Mrs. Henry Wood

You have been at Timberdale Rectory two or three times before; an old-fashioned, red-brick, irregularly-built house, the ivy clustering on its front walls. It had not much beauty to boast of, but was as comfortable a dwelling-place as any in Worcestershire. The well-stocked kitchen-garden, filled with plain fruit-trees and beds of vegetables, stretched out beyond the little lawn behind it; the small garden in front, with its sweet and homely flowers, opened to the pasture-field that lay between the house and the church.

Timberdale Rectory basked to-day in the morning sun. It shone upon Grace, the Rector’s wife, as she sat in the bow-window of their usual sitting-room, making a child’s frock. Having no little ones of her own to work for—and sometimes Timberdale thought it was that fact that made the Rector show himself so crusty to the world in general—she had time, and to spare, to sew for the poor young starvelings in her husband’s parish.

“Here he comes at last!” exclaimed Grace.

Herbert Tanerton looked round from the fire over which he was shivering, though it was a warm and lovely April day. A glass of lemonade, or some such cooling drink, stood on the table at his elbow. He was always catching a sore throat—or fancied it.

“If I find the delay has arisen through any neglect of Lee’s, I shall report him for it,” spoke the Rector severely. For, though he had condoned that one great mishap of Lee’s, the burning of the letter, he considered it his duty to look sharply after him.

“Oh but, Herbert, it cannot be; he is always punctual,” cried Grace. “I’ll go and ask.”

Mrs. Tanerton left the room, and ran down the short path to the little white gate; poor old Lee, the letterman, was approaching it from the field. Grace glanced at the church clock—three-quarters past ten.

“A break-down on the line, we hear, ma’am,” said he, without waiting to be questioned, as he put one letter into her hand. “Salmon has been in a fine way all the morning, wondering what was up.”

“Thank you,” said Grace, glancing at the letter; “we wondered too. What a beautiful day it is! Your wife will lose her rheumatism now. Tell her I say so.”

Back ran Grace. Herbert Tanerton was standing up, impatient for the letter he had been specially expecting, his hand stretched out for it.

“Your letter has not come, Herbert. Only one for me. It is from Alice.”

“Oh!” returned Herbert, crustily, as he sat down again to his fire and his lemonade.

Grace ran her eyes quickly over the letter—rather a long one, but very legibly written. Her husband’s brother, Jack Tanerton—if you have not forgotten him—had just brought home in safety from another voyage the good ship Rose of Delhi, of which he was commander. Alice, his wife, who generally voyaged with him, had gone immediately on landing to her mother at New Brighton, near Liverpool; Jack remaining with his ship. This time the ship had been chartered for London, and Jack was there with it.

Grace folded the letter slowly, an expression of pain seated in her eyes. “Would you like to read it, Herbert?” she asked.

“Not now,” groaned Herbert, shifting the band of flannel on his throat. “What does she say?”

“She says”—Grace hesitated a moment before proceeding—“she says she wishes Jack could leave the sea.”

“I dare say!” exclaimed Herbert. “Now, Grace, I’ll not have that absurd notion encouraged. It was Alice’s cry last time they were at home; and I told you then I would not.”

“I have not encouraged it, Herbert. Of course what Alice says has reason in it: one cannot help seeing that.”

“Jack chose the sea as his profession, and Jack must abide by it. A turncoat is never worth a rush. Jack likes the sea; and Jack has been successful at it.”

“Oh yes: he’s a first-rate sailor,” conceded Grace. “It is Alice’s wish, no doubt, rather than his. She says here”—opening the letter—“Oh, if Jack could but leave the sea! All my little ones coming on!—I shall not be able to go with him this next voyage. And I come home to find my little Mary and my mother both ill! If we could but leave the sea!”

“I may just as well say ‘If I could but leave the Church!’—I’m sure I’m never well in it,” retorted Herbert. “Jack had better not talk to me of this: I should put him down at once.”

Grace sighed as she took up the little frock again. She remembered, though it might suit her husband to forget it, that Jack had not, in one sense of the word, chosen the sea; he had been deluded into it by Aunt Dean, his wife’s mother. She had plotted and planned, that woman, for her daughter’s advancement, and found out too late that she had plotted wrongly; for Alice chose Jack, and Jack, through her machinations, had been deprived of the greater portion of his birthright. He made a smart sailor; he was steady, and stuck to his duty manfully; never a better merchant commander sailed out of port than John Tanerton. But, as his wife said, her little ones were beginning to grow about her; she had two already; and she could not be with them at New Brighton, and be skimming over the seas to Calcutta, or where not, in the Rose of Delhi. Interests clashed; and with her whole heart Alice wished Jack could quit the sea. Grace sighed as she thought of this; she saw how natural was the wish, though Herbert did not see it: neither could she forget that the chief portion of the fortune which ought to have been Jack’s was enjoyed by herself and her husband. She had always thought it unjust; it did not seem to bring them luck; it lay upon her heart like a weight of care. Their income from the living and the fortune, comprised together, was over a thousand pounds a-year. They lived very quietly, not spending, she was sure, anything like half of it; Herbert put by the rest. What good did all the money bring them? But little. Herbert was always ailing, fretful, and grumbling: the propensity to set the world to rights grew upon him: he had ever taken pleasure in that, from the time when a little lad he would muffle himself in his step-father’s surplice, and preach to Jack and Alice. Poor Jack had to work hard for what he earned at sea; he had only a hundred and fifty pounds a-year, besides, of the money that had been his mother’s; Herbert had the other six hundred and fifty of it. But Jack, sunny-natured, ever-ready Jack, was just as happy as the day was long.

Lost in these thoughts, her eyes bent on her work, Alice did not see a gentleman who was coming across the field towards the house. The click of the little gate, as it swung to after him, caused her to look up, but hardly in time. Herbert turned at the sound.

“Who’s come bothering now, I wonder?”

“I think it is Colonel Letsom,” answered Grace.

“Then he must come in here,” rejoined Herbert. “I am not going into that cold drawing-room.”

Colonel Letsom it was; a pleasant little man with a bald head, who had walked over from his house at Crabb. Grace opened the parlour-door, and the colonel came in and shook hands.

“I want you both to come and dine with me to-night in a friendly way,” spoke he; “no ceremony. My brother, the major, is with us for a day or two, and we’d like to get a few friends together to meet him at dinner.”

Herbert Tanerton hesitated. He did not say No, for he liked dinners; he liked the importance of sitting at the right or left hand of his hostess and saying grace. He did not say Yes, for he thought of his throat.

“I hardly know, colonel. I got up with a sore throat this morning. Very relaxed indeed it is. Who is to be there?”

“Yourselves and the Fontaines and the Todhetleys: nobody else,” answered the colonel. “As to your throat—I dare say it will be better by-and-by. A cheerful dinner will do you good. Six o’clock sharp, mind.”

Herbert Tanerton accepted the offer, conditionally. If his throat got worse, of course he should have to send word, and decline. The colonel nodded. He felt sure in his own mind the throat would get better: he knew how fanciful the parson was, and how easily he could be roused out of his ailments.

“How do you like the Fontaines?” questioned he of the colonel. “Have you seen much of them yet?”

“Oh, we like them very well,” answered the colonel, who, in his easy nature, generally avowed a liking for everybody. “They are connections of my wife’s.”

“Connections of your wife’s!” repeated Herbert quickly. “I did not know that.”

“I’m not sure that I knew it myself, until we came to compare notes,” avowed the colonel. “Any way, I did not remember it. Sir Dace Fontaine’s sister married——. Stop; let me consider—how was it?”

Grace laughed. The colonel laughed also.

“I know it now. My wife’s sister married a Captain Pym: it is many years ago. Captain Pym was a widower, and his first wife was a sister of Dace Fontaine’s. Yes, that’s it. Poor Pym and his wife died soon; both of them in India: and so, you see, we lost sight of the connection altogether; it slipped out of memory.”

“Were there any children?”

“The first wife had one son, who was, I believe, taken to by his father’s relatives. That was all. Well, you’ll come this evening,” added the colonel, turning to depart. “I must make haste back home, for they don’t know yet who’s coming and who’s not.”

A few days previously to this, we had taken up our abode at Crabb Cot, and found that some people named Fontaine had come to the neighbourhood, and were living at Maythorn Bank. Naturally the Squire wanted to know who they were and what they were. And as they were fated to play a conspicuous part in the drama I am about to relate, I must give to them a word of introduction. Important people need it, you know.

Dace Fontaine belonged to the West Indies and was attached to the civil service there. He became judge, or sheriff, or something of the kind; had been instrumental in quelling a riot of the blacks, and was knighted for it. He married rather late in life, in his forty-first year, a young American lady. This young lady’s mother—it is curious how things come about!—was first cousin to John Paul, the Islip lawyer. Lady Fontaine soon persuaded her husband to quit the West Indies for America. Being well off, for he had amassed money, he could do as he pleased; and to America they went with their two daughters. From that time they lived sometimes in America, sometimes in the West Indies: Sir Dace would not quite abandon his old home there. Changes came as the years went on: Lady Fontaine died; Sir Dace lost a good portion of his fortune through some adverse speculation. A disappointed man, he resolved to come to England and settle down on some property that had fallen to him in right of his wife; a small estate called Oxlip Grange, which lay between Islip and Crabb. Any way, old Paul got a letter, saying they were on the road. However, when they arrived, they found that the tenants at Oxlip Grange could not be got to go out of it without proper notice—which anybody but Sir Dace Fontaine would have known to be reasonable. After some cavilling, the tenants agreed to leave at the end of six months; and the Fontaines went into that pretty little place, Maythorn Bank, then to be let furnished, until the time should expire. So there they were, located close to us at Crabb Cot, Sir Dace Fontaine and his two daughters.

Colonel Letsom had included me in the dinner invitation, for which I felt obliged to him: I was curious to see what the Fontaines were like. Tom Coney said one of the girls was beautiful, lovely—like an angel: the other was a little quick, dark young woman, who seemed to have a will of her own.

We reached Colonel Letsom’s betimes—neighbourly fashion. In the country you don’t rush in when the dinner’s being put on the table; you like to get a chat beforehand. The sunbeams were slanting into the drawing-room as we entered it. Four of the Letsoms were present, besides the major, and Herbert Tanerton and his wife, for the throat was better. All of us were talking together when the strangers were announced: Sir Dace Fontaine, Miss Fontaine, and Miss Verena Fontaine.

Sir Dace was a tall, heavy man, with a dark, sallow, and arbitrary face; Miss Fontaine was little and pale; she had smooth black hair, and dark eyes that looked straight out at you. Her small teeth were brilliantly white, her chin was pointed. A particularly calm face altogether, and one that could boast of little beauty—but I rather took to it.

Did you ever see a fairy? Verena Fontaine looked like nothing else. A small, fair, graceful girl, with charming manners and pretty words. She had the true golden hair, that is so beautiful but so rare, delicate features, and laughing eyes blue as the summer sky. I think her beauty and her attractions altogether took some of us by surprise; me for one. Bob Letsom looked fit to eat her. The sisters were dressed alike, in white muslin and pink ribbons.

How we went in to dinner I don’t remember, except that Bob and I brought up the rear together. Sir Dace took Mrs. Letsom, I think, and the colonel Mrs. Todhetley; and that beautiful girl, Verena, fell to Tod. Tod! The two girls were about the most self-possessed girls I ever saw; their manners quite American. Not their accent: that was good. Major Letsom and Sir Dace fraternized wonderfully: they discovered that they had once met in the West Indies.

After dinner we had music. The sisters sang a duet, and Mary Ann Letsom a song; and Herbert Tanerton sang, forgetting his throat, Grace playing for him; and they made me sing.

The evening soon passed, and we all left together. It was a warmish night, with a kind of damp smell exhaling from the shrubs and hedges. The young ladies muffled some soft white woollen shawls round their faces, and called our climate a treacherous one. The parson and Grace said good-night, and struck off on the near way to Timberdale; the rest of us kept straight on.

“Why don’t your people always live here?” asked Verena of me, as we walked side by side behind the rest. “By something that was said at dinner I gather that you are not here much.”

“Mr. Todhetley’s principal residence lies at a distance. We only come here occasionally.”

“Well, I wish you stayed here always. It would be something to have neighbours close to us. Of course you know the dreadful little cottage we are in—Maythorn Bank?”

“Quite well. It is very pretty, though it is small.”

“Small! Accustomed to our large rooms in the western world, it seems to us that we can hardly turn in these. I wish papa had managed better! This country is altogether frightfully dull. My sister tells us that unless things improve she shall take flight back to the States. She could do it,” added Verena; “she is twenty-one now, and her own mistress.”

I laughed. “Is she obliged to be her own mistress because she is twenty-one?”

“She is her own,” said Verena. “She has come into her share of the money mamma left us and can do as she pleases.”

“Oh, you were speaking in that sense.”

“Partly. Having money, she is not tied. She could go back to-morrow if she liked. We are not bound by your English notions.”

“It would not suit our notions at all. English girls cannot travel about alone.”

“That comes of their imperfect education. What harm do you suppose could anywhere befall well brought-up girls? We have been self-dependent from childhood; taught to be so. Coral could take care of herself the whole world over, and meet with consideration, wheresoever she might be.”

“What do you call her—Coral? It is a very pretty name.”

“And coral is her favourite ornament: it suits her pale skin. Her name is really Coralie, but I call her Coral—just as she calls me Vera. Do you like my name—Verena?”

“Very much indeed. Have you read ‘Sintram’?”

“‘Sintram’!—no,” she answered. “Is it a book?”

“A very nice book, indeed, translated from the German. I will lend it you, if you like, Miss Verena.”

“Oh, thank you. I am fond of nice books. Coralie does not care for books as I do. But—I want you to tell me,” she broke off, turning her fair face to me, the white cloud drawn round it, and her sweet blue eyes laughing and dancing—“I can’t quite make out who you are. They are not your father and mother, are they?”—nodding to the Squire and Mrs. Todhetley, who were on ever so far in front with Sir Dace.

“Oh no. I only live with them. I am Johnny Ludlow.”

Maythorn Bank had not an extensive correspondence as a rule, but three letters were delivered there the following morning. One of the letters was for Verena: which she crushed into her hand in the passage and ran away with to her room. The others, addressed to Sir Dace, were laid by his own man, Ozias, on the breakfast-table to await him.

“The West Indian mail is in, papa,” observed Coralie, beginning to pour out the coffee as her father entered. “It has brought you two letters. I think one of them is from George Bazalgette.”

Sir Dace wore a rich red silk dressing-gown, well wadded. A large fire burnt in the grate of the small room. He felt the cold here much. Putting his gold eye-glasses across his nose, as he slowly sat down—all his movements were deliberate—he opened the letter his daughter had specially alluded to, and read the few lines it contained.

“What a short epistle!” exclaimed Coralie.

“George Bazalgette is coming over; he merely writes to tell me so,” replied Sir Dace. “Verena,” he added, for just then Verena entered and wished him good-morning, with a beaming face, “I have a letter here from George Bazalgette. He is coming to Europe; coming for you.”

A defiant look rose to Verena’s bright blue eyes. She opened her mouth to answer; paused; and closed it again without speaking. Perhaps she recalled the saying, “Discretion is the better part of valour.” It certainly is, when applied to speech.

Breakfast was barely over when Ozias came in again. He had a copper-coloured face, as queer as his name, but he was a faithful, honest servant, and had lived in the family twenty years. The gardener was waiting for instructions about the new flower-beds, he told his master; and Sir Dace went out. It left his daughters at liberty to talk secrets. How pretty the two graceful little figures looked in their simple morning dresses of delicate print, tied with bows of pale green ribbon.

“I told you I knew George Bazalgette would be coming over, Vera,” began Coralie. “His letter by the last mail quite plainly intimated that.”

Verena tossed her pretty head. “Let him come! He will get his voyage out and home for nothing. I hope he’ll be fearfully sea-sick!”

Not to make a mystery of the matter, which we heard all about later, and which, perhaps, led to that most dreadful crime—but I must not talk of that yet. George Bazalgette was a wealthy West Indian planter, and wanted to marry Miss Verena Fontaine. She did not want to marry him, and for the very good reason that she intended to marry somebody else. There had been a little trouble about it with Sir Dace; and alas! there was destined to be a great deal more.

“Shall I tell you what I hope, Vera?” answered Coralie, in her matter-of-fact, unemotional way. “I hope that Edward Pym will never come here, or to Europe at all, to worry you. Better that the sea should swallow him up en voyage.”

Verena’s beaming face broke into smiles. Her sister’s pleasant suggestion went for nothing, for a great joy lay within her.

“Edward Pym has come, Coral. The ship has arrived in port, and he has written to me. See!”

She took the morning’s letter from the bosom of her dress, and held it open for Coralie to see the date, “London,” and the signature “Edward.” Had the writer signed his name in full, it would have been Edward Dace Pym.

“How did he know we were here?” questioned Coralie, in surprise.

“I wrote to tell him.”

“Did you know where to write to him?”

“I knew he had sailed from Calcutta in the Rose of Delhi; we all knew that; and I wrote to him to the address of the ship’s brokers at Liverpool. The ship has come on to London, it seems, instead of Liverpool, and they must have sent my letter up there.”

“If you don’t take care, Vera, some trouble will come of this. Papa will never hear of Edward Pym. That’s my opinion.”

She was as cool as were the cucumbers growing outside in the garden, under the glass shade. Verena was the opposite—all excitement; though she did her best to hide it. Her fingers were restless; her blushes came and went; the sweet words of the short love-letter were dancing in her heart.

“My darling Vera,

“The ship is in; I am in London with her, and I have your dear letter. How I wish I could run down into Worcestershire! That cannot be just yet: our skipper will take care to be absent himself, I expect, and I must stay: he is a regular Martinet as to duty. You will see me the very hour I can get my liberty. How strange it is you should be at that place—Crabb! I believe a sort of aunt of mine lives there; but I have never seen her.

“Ever your true lover,
“Edward.”

“Who is it—the sort of aunt?” cried Coralie, when Verena had read out the letter; “and what does he mean?”

“Mrs. Letsom, of course. Did you not hear her talking to papa, last night, about her dead sister, who had married Captain Pym?”

“And Edward was the son of Captain Pym’s first wife, papa’s sister. Then, in point of fact, he is not related to Mrs. Letsom at all. Well, it all happened ages ago,” added Coralie, with supreme indifference, “long before our time.”

Just so. Edward Pym, grown to manhood now, and chief-mate of the Rose of Delhi, was the son of that Captain Pym and his first wife. When Captain Pym died, a relative of his, who had no children of his own, took to the child, then only five years old, and brought him up. The boy turned out anything but good, and when he was fourteen he ran away to sea. He found he had to stick to the sea, for his offended relative would do no more for him: except that, some years later, when he died, Edward found that he was down for five hundred pounds in his will. Edward stayed on shore to spend it, and then went to sea again, this time as first officer in an American brig. Chance, or something else, took the vessel to the West India Islands, and at one of them he fell in with Sir Dace Fontaine, who was, in fact, his uncle, but who had never taken the smallest thought for him—hardly remembered he had such a nephew—and made acquaintance with his two cousins. He and Verena fell in love with one another; and, on her side, at any rate, it was not the passing fancy sometimes called by the name, but one likely to last for all time. They often met, the young officer having the run of his uncle’s house whenever he could get ashore; and Edward, who could be as full of tricks and turns as a fox when it suited his convenience to be so, contrived to put himself into hospital when the brig was about to sail, saying he was sick; so he was left behind. The brig fairly off, Mr. Edward Pym grew well again, and looked to have a good time of idleness and love-making. But he reckoned without his host. A chance word, dropped inadvertently, opened the eyes of Sir Dace to the treason around. The first thing he did was to forbid Mr. Edward Pym his house; the second thing was to take passage with his family for America. Never would he allow his youngest and prettiest and best-loved daughter to become the wife of an ill-conducted, penniless ship’s mate; and that man a cousin! The very thought was preposterous! So Edward Pym, thrown upon his beam-ends, joined a vessel bound for Calcutta. Arrived there, he took the post of chief mate on the good ship Rose of Delhi, Captain Tanerton, bound for England.

“What is this nonsense I hear, about your wanting to leave the sea, John?”

The question, put in the Rector of Timberdale’s repellent, chilly tone, more intensified when anything displeased him, brought only a smile to the pleasant face of his brother. Ever hopeful, sunny-tempered Jack, had reached the Rectory the previous night to make a short visit. They sat in the cheerful, bow-windowed room, the sun shining on Jack, as some days before it had shone on Grace; the Rector in his easy-chair at the fire.

“Well, I suppose it is only what you say, Herbert—nonsense,” answered Jack, who was playing with the little dog, Dash. “I should like to leave the sea well enough, but I don’t see my way clear to do it at present.”

“Why should you like to leave it?”

“Alice is anxious that I should. She cannot always sail with me now; and there are the little ones to be seen to, you know, Herbert. Her mother is of course—well, very kind, and all that,” went on Jack, after an imperceptible pause, “but Alice would prefer to train her children herself; and, to do that, she must remain permanently on shore. It would not be a pleasant life for us, Herbert, she on shore and I at sea.”

“Do you ever think of duty, John?”

“Of duty? In what way?”

“When a man has deliberately chosen his calling in life, and spent his first years in it, it is his duty to continue in that calling, and to make the best of it.”

“I suppose it is, in a general way,” said Jack, all smiles and good-humour. “But—if I could get a living on shore, Herbert, I don’t see but what my duty would lie in doing it as much as it now lies at sea.”

“You may not see it, John. Chopping and changing often brings a man to poverty.”

“Oh, I’d take care, I hope, not to come to poverty. Down, Dash! Had I a farm of two or three hundred acres, I could make it answer well, if any man could. You know what a good farmer I was as a boy, Herbert—in practical knowledge, I mean—and how I loved it. I like the sea very well, but I love farming. It was my born vocation.”

“I wish you’d not talk at random!” cried Herbert, fretfully. “Born vocation! You might just as well say you were born to be a mountebank! And where would you get the money to stock a farm of two or three hundred acres? You have put none by, I expect. You never could keep your pence in your pocket when a lad: they were thrown away right and left.”

“That’s true,” laughed Jack. “Other lads used to borrow them. True also that I have not put money by, Herbert. I have not been able to.”

“Of course you have not! It wouldn’t be you if you had.”

“No, Dash, there’s not a bit more; you’ve had it all,” cried Jack to the dog. But he, ever generous-natured, did not tell his brother why he had not been able to put by: that the calls made upon him by his wife’s mother—Aunt Dean, as they still styled her—were so heavy and so perpetual. She wanted a great deal for herself, and she presented vast claims for the expenses of Jack’s two little children, and for the maintenance of her daughter when Alice stayed on shore. Alice whispered to Jack she believed her mother was making a private purse for herself. Good-natured Jack thought it very likely, but he did not stop the supplies. Just as Aunt Dean had been a perpetual drain upon her brother, Jacob Lewis, during his lifetime, so she now drained Jack.

“Then, with no means at command, what utter folly it is for you to think of leaving the sea?” resumed the parson.

“So it is, Herbert,” acquiesced Jack. “I assure you I don’t think of it.”

“Alice does.”

“Ay, poor girl, because she wishes it.”

“Do you see any chance of leaving it?”

“Not a bit,” readily acknowledged Jack.

“Then where’s the use of talking about it—of harping upon it?”

“None in the world,” said Jack.

“Then we’ll drop the subject, if you please,” pursued Herbert, forgetting, perhaps, that it was he who introduced it.

“Jump then, Dash! Jump, good little Dash!”

“What a worry you make with that dog, John! Attend to me. I want to know why you came to London instead of to Liverpool.”

“She was laid on for London this time,” answered Jack.

“Laid on!” ejaculated Herbert, who knew as much about sailor’s phrases as he did of Hebrew.

Jack laughed. “The agents in Calcutta chartered the ship for London, freights for that port being higher than for Liverpool. The Rose of Delhi is a free ship.”

“Oh,” responded Herbert. “I thought perhaps she had changed owners.”

“No. But our broker in London is brother to the owners in Liverpool. There are three of them in all. James Freeman is the broker; Charles and Richard are the owners. Rich men they must be!”

“When do you think you shall sail again?”

“It depends upon when they can begin to reload and get the fresh cargo in.”

“That does not take long, I suppose,” remarked Herbert, slightingly.

“She may be loaded in three days if the cargo is ready and waiting. It may be three weeks if the cargo’s not—or more than that.”

“And Alice does not go with you?”

Jack shook his head: something like a cloud passed over his fresh, frank face. “No, not this time.”

We were all glad to see Jack Tanerton again. He had paid Timberdale but one visit, and that a flying one, since he took command of the Rose of Delhi. It was the old Jack Tanerton, frank of face, hearty of manner, flying to all the nooks and corners of the parish with outstretched hands to rich and poor, with kind words and generous help for the sick and sorrowful: just the same, only with a few more years gone over his head. I don’t say but Herbert was also glad to see him; only Herbert never displayed much gladness at anything.

One morning Jack and I chanced to be out together; when, in passing through the green and shady lane, that would be fragrant in summer with wild roses and woodbine, and that skirted Maythorn Bank, we saw some one stooping to peer through the sweetbriar hedge, as if he wanted to see what the house was like, and did not care to look at it openly. He sprang up at sound of our footsteps. It was a slight, handsome young man of five or six-and-twenty, rather under the middle height, with a warm colour, bright dark eyes, and dark whiskers. The gold band on his cap showed that he was a sailor, and he seemed to recognize Jack with a start.

“Good-morning, sir,” he cried, hurriedly.

“Is it you, Mr. Pym?—good-morning,” returned Jack, in a cool tone. “What are you doing down here?”

“The ship’s finished unloading, and is gone into dry dock to be re-coppered, so I’ve got a holiday,” replied the young man: and he walked away with a brisk step, as if not caring to be questioned further.

“Who is he?” I asked, as we went on in the opposite direction.

“My late chief mate: a man named Pym.”

“You spoke as if you did not like him, Jack.”

“Don’t like him at all,” said Jack. “My own chief mate left me in Calcutta, to better himself, as the saying runs; he got command of one of our ships whose master had died out there; Pym presented himself to me, and I engaged him. He gave me some trouble on the homeward voyage; drank, was insolent, and would shirk his duty when he could. Once I had to threaten to put him in irons. I shall never allow him to sail with me again—and he knows it.”

“What is he here for?”

“Don’t know at all,” returned Jack. “He can’t have come after me, I suppose.”

“Has he left the ship?”

“I can’t tell. I told the brokers in London I should wish to have another first officer appointed in Pym’s place. When they asked why, I only said he and I did not hit it off together very well. I don’t care to report ill of the young man; it might damage his prospects; and he may do better with another master than he did with me.”

At that moment Pym overtook us, and accosted Jack: saying something about some bales of “jute,” which, as I gathered, had constituted part of the cargo.

“Have you got your discharge from the ship, Mr. Pym?” asked Jack, after answering his question about the bales of jute.

“No, sir.”

“No!”

“Not yet. I have not applied for it. There’s some talk, I fancy, of making Ferrar chief,” added Pym. “Until then I keep my post.”

The words were not insolent, but the tone had a ring in it that betokened no civility. I thought Pym would have liked to defy Jack had he dared. Jack’s voice, as he answered, was a little haughty—and I had never heard that from Jack in all my life.

“I shall not take Ferrar as chief. What are you talking of, Mr. Pym? Ferrar is not qualified.”

“Ferrar is qualifying himself now; he is about to pass,” retorted Pym. “Good-afternoon, sir.”

Had Pym looked back as he turned off, he would have seen Sir Dace Fontaine, who came, in his slow, lumbering manner, round the corner. Jack, who had been introduced to him, stopped to speak. But not a word could Sir Dace answer, for staring at the retreating figure of Pym.

“Does my sight deceive me?” he exclaimed. “Who is that man?”

“His name is Pym,” said Jack. “He has been my first mate on board the Rose of Delhi.”

Sir Dace Fontaine looked blacker than thunder. “What is he doing down here?”

“I was wondering what,” said Jack. “At first I thought he might have come down after me on some errand or other.”

Sir Dace said no more. Remarking that we should meet again in the evening, he went his way, and we went ours.

For that evening the Squire gave a dinner, to which the Fontaines were coming, and old Paul the lawyer, and the Letsoms, and the Ashtons from Timberdale Court. Charles Ashton, the parson, was staying with them: he would come in handy for the grace in place of Herbert Tanerton, who had a real sore throat this time, and must stay at home.

But now it should be explained that, up to this time, none of us had the smallest notion that there was anything between Pym and Verena Fontaine, or that Pym was related to Sir Dace. Had Jack known either the one fact or the other, he might not have said what he did at the Squire’s dinner-table. Not that he said much.

It occurred during a lull. Sir Dace craned his long and ponderous neck over the table towards Jack.

“Captain Tanerton, were you satisfied with that chief mate of yours, Edward Pym? Did he do his duty as a chief mate ought?”

“Not always, Sir Dace,” was Jack’s ready answer. “I was not particularly well satisfied with him.”

“Will he sail with you again when you go out?”

“No. Not if the decision lies with me.”

Sir Dace frowned and drew his neck in again. I fancied he would have been glad to hear that Pym was going out again with Jack—perhaps to be rid of him.

Colonel Letsom spoke up then. “Why do you not like him, Jack?”

“Well, for one thing, I found him deceitful,” spoke out Jack, after hesitating a little, and still without any idea that Pym was known to anybody present.

Verena bent forward to speak then from the end of the table, her face all blushes, her tone resentful.

“Perhaps Mr. Pym might say the same thing of you, Captain Tanerton—that you are deceitful?”

“I!” returned Jack, with his frank smile. “No, I don’t think he could say that. Whatever other faults I may have, I am straightforward and open: too much so, perhaps, on occasion.”

When the ladies left the table, the Squire despatched me with a message to old Thomas about the claret. In the hall, after delivering it, I came upon Verena Fontaine.

“I am going to run home for my music,” she said to me, as she put her white shawl on her shoulders. “I forgot to bring it.”

“Let me go for you,” I said, taking down my hat.

“No, thank you; I must go myself.”

“With you, then.”

“I wish to go alone,” she returned, in a playful tone, but one that had a decisive ring in it. “Stay where you are, if you please, Mr. Johnny Ludlow.”

She meant it; I saw that; and I put my hat down and went into the drawing-room. Presently somebody missed her; I said she had gone home to fetch her music.

Upon which they all attacked me for letting her go—for not offering to fetch it for her. Tod and Bob Letsom, who had just come into the room, told me I was not more gallant than a rising bear. I laughed, and did not say what had passed. Mary Ann Letsom plunged into one of her interminable sonatas, and the time slipped on.

“Johnny,” whispered the mater to me, “you must go after Verena Fontaine to see what has become of her. You ought not to have allowed her to go out alone.”

Truth to say, I was myself beginning to wonder whether she meant to come back at all. Catching up my hat again, I ran off to Maythorn Bank.

Oh! Pacing slowly the shadiest part of the garden there, was Miss Verena, the white shawl muffled round her. Mr. Pym was pacing with her, his face bent down to a level with hers, his arm passed gingerly round her waist.

“I thought they might be sending after me,” she cried out, quitting Pym as I went in at the gate. “I will go back with you, Mr. Johnny. Edward, I can’t stay another moment,” she called back to him; “you see how it is. Yes, I’ll be walking in the Ravine to-morrow.”

Away she went, with so fleet a step that I had much ado to keep up with her. That was my first enlightenment of the secret treason which was destined to bring forth so terrible an ending.

“You won’t tell tales of me, Johnny Ludlow?” she stopped to say, in a beseeching tone, as we reached the gate of Crabb Cot. “See, I have my music now.”

“All right, Miss Verena. You may trust me.”

“I am sure of that. I read it in your face.”

Which might be all very well; but I thought it would be more to the purpose could she have read it in Pym’s. Pym’s was a handsome face, but not one to be trusted.

She glided into the room behind Thomas and his big tea-tray, seized upon a cup at once, and stood with it as coolly as though she had never been away. Sir Dace, talking near the window with old Paul, looked across at her, but said nothing. I wondered how long they had been in the drawing-room, and whether he had noticed her absence.

It was, I think, the next afternoon but one that I went to Maythorn Bank, and found Jack Tanerton there. The Squire had offered to drive Sir Dace to Worcester, leaving him to fix the day. Sir Dace wrote a note to fix the following day, if that would suit; and the Squire sent me to say it would.

Coralie was in the little drawing-room with Sir Dace, but not Verena. Jack seemed to be quite at home with them; they were talking with animation about some of the ports over the seas, which all three of them knew so well. When I left, Jack came with me, and Sir Dace walked with us to the gate. And there we came upon Mr. Pym and Miss Verena promenading together in the lane as comfortably as you please. You should have seen Sir Dace Fontaine’s face. A dark face at all times; frightfully dark then.

Taking Verena by the shoulder, never speaking a word, he marched her in at the gate, and pushed her up the path towards the house. Then he turned round to Pym.

“Mr. Edward Pym,” said he, “as I once had occasion to warn you off my premises in the Colonies, I now warn you off these. This is my house, and I forbid you to approach it. I forbid you to attempt to hold intercourse of any kind with my daughters. Do you understand me, sir?”

“Quite so, Uncle Dace,” replied the young man: and there was the same covert defiance in his tone that he had used the other day to his captain.

“I should like to know what brings you in this neighbourhood?” continued Sir Dace. “You cannot have any legitimate business here. I recommend you to leave it.”

“I will think of it,” said Pym, as he lifted his cap to us generally, and went his way.

“What does it mean, Johnny?” spoke Tanerton, breathlessly, when we were alone. “Is Pym making-up to that sweet girl?”

“I fancy so. Wanting to make up, at least.”

“Heaven help her, then! It’s like his impudence.”

“They are first cousins, you see.”

“So much the worse. I expect, though, Pym will find his match in Sir Dace. I don’t like him, by the way, Johnny.”

“Whom? Pym?”

“Sir Dace. I don’t like his countenance: there’s too much secretiveness in it for me. And in himself too, unless I am mistaken.”

“I am sure there is in Pym.”

“I hate Pym!” flashed Jack. And at the moment he looked as if he did.

But would he have acknowledged as much, even to me, had he foreseen the cruel fate that was, all too soon, to place Edward Pym beyond the pale of this world’s hate?—and the dark trouble it would bring home to himself, John Tanerton?

II.

Striding along through South Crabb, and so on down by old Massock’s brick-fields, went Sir Dace Fontaine, dark and gloomy. His heavy stick and his heavy tread kept pace together; both might have been the better for a little lightness.

Matters were not going on too smoothly at Maythorn Bank. Seemingly obedient to her father, Verena Fontaine contrived to meet her lover, and did not take extraordinary pains to keep it secret. Sir Dace, watching stealthily, found it out, and felt just about at his wits’ end.

He had no power to banish Edward Pym from the place: he had none, one must conclude, to exact submission from Verena. She had observed to me, the first night we met, that American girls grow up to be independent of control in many ways. That is true: and, as it seems to me, they think great guns of themselves for being so.

Sir Dace was beginning to turn his anger on Colonel Letsom. As chance had it, while he strode along this morning, full of wrath, the colonel came in view, turning the corner of the strongest and most savoury brick-yard.

“Why do you harbour that fellow?” broke out Sir Dace, fiercely, without circumlocution of greeting.

“What, young Pym?” cried the little colonel in his mild way, jumping to the other’s meaning. “I don’t suppose he will stay with us long. He is expecting a summons to join his ship.”

“But why do you have him at your house at all?” reiterated Sir Dace, with a thump of his stick. “Why did you take him in?”

“Well, you see, he came down, a stranger, and presented himself to us, calling my wife aunt, though she is not really so, and said he would like to stay a few days with us. We could not turn him away, Sir Dace. In fact we had no objection to his staying; he behaves himself very well. He’ll not be here long.”

“He has been here a great deal too long,” growled Sir Dace; and went on his way muttering.

Nothing came of this complaint of Sir Dace Fontaine’s. Edward Pym continued to stay at Crabb, Colonel Letsom not seeing his way clear to send him adrift; perhaps not wanting to. The love-making went on. In the green meadows, where the grass and the sweet wild flowers were springing up, in the Ravine, between its sheltering banks, redolent of romance; or in the triangle, treading underfoot the late primroses and violets—in one or other of these retreats might Mr. Pym and his ladye-love be seen together, listening to the tender vows whispered between them, and to the birds’ songs.

Sir Dace, conscious of all this, grew furious, and matters came to a climax. Verena was bold enough to steal out one night to meet Pym for a promenade with him in the moonlight, and Sir Dace came upon them sitting on the stile at the end of the cross lane. He gave it to Pym hot and strong, marched Verena home, and the next day carried both his daughters away from Crabb.

But I ought to mention that I had gone away from Crabb myself before this, and was in London in with Miss Deveen. So that what had been happening lately I only knew by hearsay.

To what part of the world Sir Dace went, was not known. Naturally Crabb was curious upon the point. Just as naturally it was supposed that Pym, having nothing to stay for, would now take his departure. Pym, however, stayed on.

One morning Mr. Pym called at Maythorn Bank. An elderly woman, one Betty Huntsman, who had been employed by the Fontaines as cook, opened the door to him. The coloured man, Ozias, and a maid, Esther, had gone away with the family. It was the second time Mr. Pym had presented himself upon the same errand: to get the address of Sir Dace Fontaine. Betty, obeying her master’s orders, had refused it; this time he had come to bribe her. Old Betty, however, an honest, kindly old woman, refused to be bribed.

“I can’t do it, sir,” she said to Pym. “When the master wrote to give me the address, on account of sending him his foreign letters, he forbade me to disclose it to anybody down here. It is only myself that knows it, sir.”

“It is in London; I know that much,” affirmed Pym, making a shot at the place, and so far taking in old Betty.

“That much may possibly be known, sir. I cannot tell more.”

Back went Pym to Colonel Letsom’s. He sat down and wrote a letter in a young lady’s hand—for he had all kinds of writing at his fingers’ ends—and addressed it to Mrs. Betty Huntsman at Maythorn Bank, Worcestershire. This he enclosed in a bigger envelope, with a few lines from himself, and posted it to London, to one Alfred Saxby, a sailor friend of his. He next, in a careless, off-hand manner, asked Colonel Letsom if he’d mind calling at Maythorn Bank, and asking the old cook there if she could give him her master’s address. Oh, Pym was as cunning as a fox, and could lay out his plans artfully. And Colonel Letsom, unsuspicious as the day, and willing to oblige everybody, did call that afternoon to put the question to Betty; but she told him she was not at liberty to give the address.

The following morning, Pym got the summons he had been expecting, to join his ship. The Rose of Delhi was now ready to take in cargo. After swearing a little, down sat Mr. Pym to his desk, and in a shaky hand, to imitate a sick man’s, wrote back word that he was ill in bed, but would endeavour to be up in London on the morrow.

And, the morning following this, Mrs. Betty Huntsman got a letter from London.

“London, Thursday.

“Dear old Betty,

“I am writing to you for papa, who is very poorly indeed. Should Colonel Letsom apply to you for our address here, you are to give it him: papa wishes him to have it. We hope your wrist is better.

“Coralie Fontaine.”

Betty Huntsman, honest herself, never supposed but the letter was written by Miss Fontaine. By-and-by, there came a ring at the bell.

“My uncle, Colonel Letsom, requested me to call here this morning, as I was passing on my way to Timberdale Rectory,” began Mr. Pym; for it was he who rang, and by his authoritative voice and lordly manner, one might have thought he was on board a royal frigate, commanding a cargo of refractory soldiers.

“Yes, sir!” answered Betty, dropping a curtsy.

“Colonel Letsom wants your master’s address in London—if you can give it him. He has to write to Sir Dace to-day.”

Betty produced a card from her innermost pocket, and showed it to Mr. Pym: who carefully copied down the address.

That he was on his way to Timberdale Rectory, was not a ruse. He went on there through the Ravine at the top of his speed, and asked for Captain Tanerton.

“Have got orders to join ship, sir, and am going up this morning. Any commands?”

“To join what ship?” questioned Jack.

“The Rose of Delhi. She is beginning to load.”

Jack paused. “Of course you must go up, as you are sent for. But I don’t think you will go out in the Rose of Delhi, Mr. Pym. I should recommend you to look out for another ship.”

“Time enough for that, Captain Tanerton, when I get my discharge from the Rose of Delhi: I have not got it yet,” returned Pym, who seemed to take a private delight in thwarting his captain.

“Well, I shall be in London myself shortly, and will see about things,” spoke Jack.

“Any commands, sir?”

“Not at present.”

Taking his leave of Colonel and Mrs. Letsom, and thanking them for their hospitality, Edward Pym departed for London by an afternoon train. He left his promises and vows to the young Letsoms, boys and girls, to come down again at the close of the next voyage, little dreaming, poor ill-fated young man, that he would never go upon another. Captain Tanerton wrote at once to head-quarters in Liverpool, saying he did not wish to retain Pym as chief mate, and would like another one to be appointed. Strolling back to Timberdale Rectory from posting the letter at Salmon’s, John Tanerton fell into a brown study.

A curious feeling, against taking Pym out again, lay within him; like an instinct, it seemed; a prevision of warning. Jack was fully conscious of it, though he knew not why it should be there. It was a great deal stronger than could have been prompted by his disapprobation of the man’s carelessness in his duties on board.

“I’ll go up to London to-morrow,” he decided. “Best to do so. Pym means to sail in the Rose of Delhi if he can; just, I expect, because he sees I don’t wish him to: the man’s nature is as contrary as two sticks. I’ll not have him again at any price. Yes, I must go up to-morrow.”

“L’homme propose”—we know the proverb. Very much to Jack’s surprise, his wife arrived that evening at the Rectory from Liverpool, with her eldest child, Polly. Therefore, Jack did not start for London on the morrow; it would not have been at all polite.

He went up the following week. His first visit was to Eastcheap, in which bustling quarter stood the office of Mr. James Freeman, the ship’s broker. After talking a bit about the ship and her cargo, Jack spoke of Pym.

“Has a first officer been appointed in Pym’s place?”

“No,” said Mr. Freeman. “Pym goes out with you again.”

“I told you I did not wish to take Pym again,” cried Jack.

“You said something about it, I know, and we thought of putting in the mate from the Star of Lahore; but he wants to keep to his own vessel.”

“I won’t take Pym.”

“But why, Captain Tanerton?”

“We don’t get on together. I never had an officer who gave me so much provocation—the Americans would say, who riled me so. I believe the man dislikes me, and for that reason was insubordinate. He may do better in another ship. I am a strict disciplinarian on board.”

“Well,” carelessly observed the broker, “you will have to make the best of him this voyage, Captain Tanerton. It is decided that he sails with you again.”

“Then, don’t be surprised if there’s murder committed,” was Jack’s impetuous answer.

And Mr. Freeman stared: and noted the words.

The mid-day sun was shining hotly upon the London pavement, and especially upon the glittering gold band adorning the cap of a lithe, handsome young sailor, who had just got out of a cab, and was striding along as though he wanted to run a race with the clocks. It was Edward Pym: and the reader will please take notice that we have gone back a few days, for this was the day following Pym’s arrival in London.

“Halt a step,” cried he to himself, his eye catching the name written up at a street corner. “I must be out of my bearings.”

Taking from his pocket a piece of paper, he read some words written there. It was no other than the address he had got from Bessy Huntsman the previous day.

“Woburn Place, Russell Square,” repeated he. “This is not it. I’ll be shot if I know where I am! Can you tell me my way to Woburn Place?” asked he, of a gentleman who was passing.

“Turn to the left; you will soon come to it.”

“Thank you,” said Pym.

The right house sighted at last, Mr. Pym took his standing in a friendly door-way on the other side of the road, and put himself on the watch. Very much after the fashion of a bailiff’s man, who wants to serve a writ.

He glanced up at the windows; he looked down at the doors; he listened to the sound of a church clock striking; he scraped his feet in impatience, now one foot, now the other. Nothing came of it. The rooms behind the curtained windows might be untenanted for all the sign given out to the eager eyes of Mr. Pym.

“Hang it all!” he cried, in an explosion of impatience: and he could have sent the silent dwelling to Jericho.

No man of business likes his time to be wasted: and Mr. Pym could very especially not afford to waste his to-day. For he was supposed to be at St. Katherine’s Docks, checking cargo on board the Rose of Delhi. When twelve o’clock struck, the dinner hour, he had made a rush from the ship, telling the foreman of the shed not to ship any more cargo till he came back in half-an-hour, and had come dashing up here in a fleet cab. The half-hour had expired, and another half-hour to it, and it was a great deal more than time to dash back again. If anybody from the office chanced to go down to the ship, what a row there’d be!—and he would probably get his discharge.

He had not been lucky in his journey from Worcestershire the previous day. The train was detained so on the line, through some heavy waggons having come to grief, that he did not reach London till late at night; too late to go down to his lodgings near the docks; so he slept at an hotel. This morning he had reported himself at the broker’s office; and Mr. Freeman, after blowing him up for his delay, ordered him on board at once: since they began to load, two days ago now, a clerk from the office had been down on the ship, making up the cargo-books in Pym’s place.

“I’ll be hanged if I don’t believe they must all be dead!” cried Pym, gazing at the house. “Why does not somebody show himself? I can’t post the letter—for I know my letters to her are being suppressed. And I dare not leave it at the door myself, lest that cantankerous Ozias should answer me, and hand it to old Dace, instead of to Vera.”

Luck at last! The door opened, and a maid-servant came out with a jug, her bonnet thrown on perpendicularly. Mr. Pym kept her in view, and caught her up as she was nearing a public-house.

“You come from Mrs. Ball’s, Woburn Place?” said he.

“Yes, sir,” answered the girl, doubtfully, rather taken aback at the summary address, but capitulating to the gold-lace band.

“I want you to give this letter privately to Miss Verena Fontaine. When she is quite alone, you understand. And here’s half-a-crown, my pretty lass, for your trouble.”

The girl touched neither letter nor money. She surreptitiously put her bonnet straight, in her gratified vanity.

“But I can’t give it, sir,” she said. “Though I’m sure I’d be happy to oblige you if I could. The Miss Fontaines and their papa is not with us now; they’ve gone away.”

“What?” cried Pym, setting his teeth angrily, an expression crossing his face that marred all its good looks. “When did they leave? Where are they gone to?”

“They left yesterday, sir, and they didn’t say where. That black servant of theirs and our cook couldn’t agree; there was squabbles perpetual. None of us liked him; it don’t seem Christian-like to have a black man sitting down to table with you. Mrs. Ball, our missis, she took our part; and the young ladies and their papa they naturally took his part: and so, they left.”

“Can I see Mrs. Ball?” asked Pym, after mentally anathematizing servants in general, black and white. “Is she at home?”

“Yes, sir, and she’ll see you, I’m sure. She is vexed at their having left.”

He dropped the half-crown into the girl’s hand, returned the note to his pocket, and went to the house. Mrs. Ball, a talkative, good-humoured woman in a rusty black silk gown, with red cheeks and quick brown eyes, opened the door to him herself.

She invited him in. She would have given him Sir Dace Fontaine’s address with all the pleasure in life, if she had it, she said. Sir Dace did not leave it with her. He simply bade her take in any letters that might come, and he would send for them.

“Have you not any notion where they went?—to what part of the town?” asked the discomfited Pym. That little trick he had played Betty Huntsman was of no use to him now.

“Not any. Truth to say, I was too vexed to ask,” confessed Mrs. Ball. “I knew nothing about their intention to leave until they were packing up. Sir Dace paid me a week’s rent in lieu of warning, and away they went in two cabs. You are related to them, sir? There’s a look in your face that Sir Dace has got.”

Mr. Pym knitted his brow; he did not take it as a compliment. Many people had seen the same likeness; though he was a handsome young man and Sir Dace an ugly old one.

“If you can get their address, I shall be much obliged to you to keep it for me; I will call again to-morrow evening,” were his parting words to the landlady. And he went rattling back to the docks as fast as wheels could take him.

Mr. Pym went up to Woburn Place the following evening accordingly, but the landlady had no news to give him. He went the next evening after, and the next, and the next. All the same. He went so long and to so little purpose that he at last concluded the Fontaines were not in London. Sir Dace neither sent a messenger nor wrote for any letters there might be. Two were waiting for him; no more. Edward Pym and Mrs. Ball became, so to say, quite intimate. She had much sympathy with the poor young man, who wanted to find his relatives before he sailed—and could not.

It may as well be told, not to make an unnecessary mystery of it, that the Fontaines had gone straight to Brighton. At length, however, Mrs. Ball was one day surprised by a visit from Ozias. She never bore malice long, and received him civilly. Her rooms were let again, so she had got over the smart.

“At Brighton!” she exclaimed, when she heard where they had been—for the man had no orders to conceal it. “I thought it strange that your master did not send for his letters. And how are the young ladies? And where are you staying now?”

“The young ladies, they well,” answered Ozias. “We stay now at one big house in Marylebone Road. We come up yesterday to this London town: Sir Dace, he find the sea no longer do for him; make him have much bile.”

Edward Pym had been in a rage at not finding Verena. Verena, on her part, though rather wondering that she did not hear from him, looked upon his silence as only a matter of precaution. When they were settled at Woburn Place, after leaving Crabb, she had written to Pym, enjoining him not to reply. It might not be safe, she said, for Coralie had gone over to “the enemy,” meaning Sir Dace: Edward must contrive to see her when he came to London to join his ship. And when the days went on, and Verena saw nothing of her lover, she supposed he was not yet in London. She went to Brighton supposing the same. But, now that they were back from Brighton, and still neither saw Pym nor heard from him, Verena grew uneasy, fearing that the Rose of Delhi had sailed.

“What a strange thing it is about Edward!” she exclaimed one evening to her sister. “I think he must have sailed. He would be sure to come to us if he were in London.”

“How should he know where we are?” dissented Coralie. “For all he can tell, Vera, we may be in the moon.”

A look of triumph crossed Vera’s face. “He knows the address in Woburn Place, Coral, for I wrote and gave it him: and Mrs. Ball would direct him here. Papa sent Ozias there to-day for his letters; and I know Edward would never cease going there, day by day, to ask for news, until he heard of me.”

Coralie laughed softly. Unlocking her writing-case, she displayed a letter that lay snugly between its leaves. It was the one that Vera had written at Woburn Place. Verena turned very angry, but Coralie made light of it.

“As I dare say he has already sailed, I confess my treachery, Vera. It was all done for your good. Better think no more of Edward Pym.”

“You wicked thing! You are more cruel than Bluebeard. I shall take means to ascertain whether the Rose of Delhi is gone. Captain Tanerton made a boast that he’d not take Edward out again, but he may not have been able to help himself,” pursued Vera, her tone significant. “Edward intended to go in her, and he has a friend at court.”

“A friend at court!” repeated Coralie. “What do you mean? Who is it?”

“It is the Freemans out-door manager at Liverpool, and the ship’s husband—a Mr. Gould. He came up here when the ship got in, and he and Edward made friends together. The more readily because Gould and Captain Tanerton are not friends. The captain complained to the owners last time of something or other connected with the ship—some bad provisions, I think, that had been put on board, and insisted on its being rectified. As Mr. Gould was responsible, he naturally resented this, and ever since he has been fit to hang Captain Tanerton.”

“How do you know all this, Verena?”

“From Edward. He told me at Crabb. Mr. Gould has a great deal more to do with choosing the officers than the Freemans themselves have, and he promised Edward he should remain in the Rose of Delhi.”

“It is strange Edward should care to remain in the ship when her commander does not like him,” remarked Coralie.

“He stays in because of that—to thwart Tanerton,” laughed Verena lightly. “Partly, at least. But he thinks, you see, and I think, that his remaining for two voyages in a ship that has so good a name may tell well for him with papa. Now you know, Coral.”

The lovers met. Pym found her out through Mrs. Ball. And Verena, thoroughly independent in her notions, put on her bonnet, and walked with him up and down the Marylebone Road.

“We sail this day week, Vera,” he said. “My life has been a torment to me, fearing I should not see you before the ship went out of dock. And, in that case, I don’t think I should have gone in her.”

“Is it the Rose of Delhi?” asked Vera.

“Of course. I told you Gould would manage it. She is first-rate in every way, and the most comfortable ship I ever was in—barring the skipper.”

“You don’t like him, I know. And he does not like you.”

“I hate and detest him,” said Pym warmly—therefore, as the reader must perceive, no love was lost between him and Jack. “He is an awful screw for keeping one to one’s duty, and I expect we shall have no end of squalls. Ah, Verena,” continued the young man, in a changed tone, “had you only listened to my prayers at Crabb, I need not have sailed again at all.”

Mr. Edward Pym was a bold wooer. He had urged Verena to cut the matter short by marrying him at once. She stopped his words.

“I will marry you in twelve months from this, if all goes well, but not before. It is waste of time to speak of it, Edward—as I have told you. Were I to marry without papa’s consent—and you know he will not give it—he can take most of the money that came to me from mamma. Only a small income would remain to me. I shall not risk that.”

“As if Sir Dace would exact it! He might go into one of his passions at first, but he’d soon come round; he’d not touch your money, Vera.” And Edward Pym, in saying this, fully believed it.

“You don’t know papa. I have been used to luxuries, Edward, and I could not do without them. What would two hundred pounds a-year be for me—living as I have lived? And for you, also, for you would be my husband? Next May I shall be of age, and my fortune will be safe—all my own.”

“A thousand things may happen in a year,” grumbled Pym, who was wild to lead an idle life, and hated the discipline on board ship. “The Rose of Delhi may go down, and I with it.”

“She has not gone down yet. Why should she go down now?”

“What right had Coralie to intercept your letter?” asked Pym, passing to another phase of his grievances.

“She had no right; but she did it. I asked Esther, our own maid, to run and put it in the post for me. Coralie, coming in from walking, met Esther at the door, saw the letter in her hand, and took it from her, saying she would go back and post it herself. Perhaps Esther suspected something: she did not tell me this. Coralie had the face to tell it me herself yesterday.”

“Well, Vera, you should have managed better,” returned Pym, feeling frightfully cross.

“Oh, Edward, don’t you see how it is?” wailed the girl, in a piteous tone of appeal—“that they are all against me. Or, rather, against you. Papa, Coralie, and Ozias: and I fancy now that Coralie has spoken to Esther. Papa makes them think as he thinks.”

“It is a fearful shame. Is this to be our only interview?”

“No,” said Vera. “I will see you every day until you sail.”

“You may not be able to. We shall be watched, now Coralie has turned against us.”

“I will see you every day until you sail,” repeated the girl, with impassioned fervour. “Come what may, I will contrive to see you.”

In making this promise, Miss Verena Fontaine probably did not understand the demands on a chief mate’s time when a ship is getting ready for sea. To rush up from the docks at the mid-day hour, and rush back again in time for work, was not practicable. Pym had done it once; he could not do it twice. Therefore, the only time to be seized upon was after six o’clock, when the Rose of Delhi was left to herself and her watchman for the night, and the dock-gates were shut. This brought it, you see, to about seven o’clock, before Pym could be hovering, like a wandering ghost, up and down the Marylebone Road; for he had to go to his lodgings in Ship Street first and put himself to rights after his day’s work, to say nothing of drinking his tea. And seven o’clock was Miss Verena Fontaine’s dinner hour. Sir Dace Fontaine’s mode of dining was elaborate; and, what with the side-dishes, the puddings and the dessert, it was never over much before nine o’clock.

For two days Verena made her dinner at luncheon. Late dining did not agree with her, she told Coralie, and she should prefer some tea in her room. Coralie watched, and saw her come stealing in each night soon after nine. Until that hour, she had promenaded with Edward Pym in the bustling lighted streets, or in the quieter walks of the Regent’s Park. On the third day, Sir Dace told her that she must be in her place at the dinner-table. Verena wondered whether the order emanated from his arbitrary temper, or whether he had any suspicion. So, that evening she dined as usual; and when she and Coralie went into the drawing-room at eight o’clock, she said her head ached, and she should go to bed.

That night there was an explosion. Docked of an hour at the beginning of their interview, the two lovers made up for it by lingering together an hour longer at the end of it. It was striking ten when Verena came in, and found herself confronted by her father. Verena gave Coralie the credit of betraying her, but in that she was wrong. Sir Dace—he might have had his suspicions—suddenly called for a particular duet that was a favourite with his daughters, bade Coralie look it out, and sent up for Verena to come down and sing it. Miss Verena was not to be found, so could not obey.

Sir Dace, I say, met her on the stairs as she came in. He put his hand on her shoulder to turn her footsteps to the drawing-room, and shut the door. Then came the explosion. Verena did not deny that she had been out with Pym. And Sir Dace, in very undrawing-room-like language, swore that she should see Pym no more.

“We have done no harm, papa. We have been to Madame Tussaud’s.”

“Listen to me, Verena. Attempt to go outside this house again while that villain is in London, and I will carry you off, as I carried you from Crabb. You cannot beard me.”

It was not pleasant to look at the face of Sir Dace as he said it. At these moments of excitement, it would take a dark tinge underneath the skin, as if the man, to use Jack Tanerton’s expression, had a touch of the tar-brush; and the dark sullen eyes would gleam with a peculiar light, that did not remind one of an angel.

“We saw Henry the Eighth and his six wives,” went on Vera. “Jane Seymour looked the nicest.”

“How dare you talk gibberish, at a moment like this?” raved Sir Dace. “As to that man, I have cursed him. And you will learn to thank me for it.”

Verena turned whiter than a sheet. Her answering words seemed brave enough, but her voice shook as she spoke them.

“Papa, you have no right to interfere with my destiny in life; no, though you are the author of my being. I have promised to be the wife of my cousin Edward, and no earthly authority shall stay me. You may be able to control my movements now by dint of force, for you are stronger than I am; but my turn will come.”

“Edward Pym—hang him!—is bad to the backbone.”

“I will have him whether he is bad or good,” was Verena’s mental answer: but she did not say it aloud.

“And I will lock you in your room from this hour, if you dare defy me,” hissed Sir Dace.

“I do not defy you, papa. It is your turn, I say; and you have strength and power on your side.”

“Take care you do not. It would be the worse for you.”

“Very well, papa,” sighed Verena. “I cannot help myself now; but in a twelvemonth’s time I shall be my own mistress. We shall see then.”

Sir Dace looked upon the words as a sort of present concession. He concluded Miss Verena had capitulated and would not again go a-roving. So he did not go the length of locking her in her room.

Verena was mild as milk the next day, and good as gold. She never stirred from the side of Coralie, but sat practising a new netting-stitch, her temper sweet, her face placid. The thought of stealing out again to meet Mr. Pym was apparently further off than Asia.

I have said that I was in London at this time, staying with Miss Deveen. It was curious that I should be so during those dreadful events that were so soon to follow. Connected with the business that kept me and Mr. Brandon in town, was a short visit made us by the Squire. Not that the Squire need have come; writing would have done; but he was nothing loth to do so: and it was lovely weather. He stayed with Mr. Brandon at his hotel in Covent Garden; and we thought he meant to make a week of it. The Squire was as fond of the sights and the shops as any child.

I went down one morning to breakfast with them at the Tavistock, and there met Jack Tanerton. Later, we started to take a look at a famous cricket-match that was being played at Lord’s. In crossing the Marylebone Road, we met Sir Dace Fontaine.

His lodgings were close by, he said, and he would have us go in. It was the day I have just told you of; when Verena sat, good as gold, by her sister’s side, trying the new netting-stitch.

The girls were in a sort of boudoir, half-way up the stairs. The French would, I suppose, call it the entresol: a warm-looking room, with stained glass in the windows, and a rich coloured carpet. Coralie and Vera were, as usual, dressed alike, in delicate summer-muslins. Vera—how pretty she looked!—had blue ribbon in her hair: her blue eyes laughed at seeing us, a pink flush set off her dimples.

“When do you sail, Captain Tanerton?” abruptly asked Sir Dace, suddenly interrupting the conversation.

“On Thursday, all being well,” answered Jack.

“Do you take out the same mate?—that Pym?”

“I believe so; yes, Sir Dace.”

We had to go away, or should not find standing-room on the cricket-ground. Sir Dace said he would accompany us, and called out to Ozias to bring his hat. Before the hat came, he thought better of it, and said he would not go; those sights fatigued him. I did not know what had taken place until later, or I might have thought he stayed at home to guard Verena. He gave us a cordial invitation to dinner in the evening, we must all go, he said; and Mr. Brandon was the only one of us who declined.

“I am very busy,” said Jack, “but I will contrive to get free by seven this evening.”

“Very busy indeed, when you can spend the day at Lord’s!” laughed Verena.

“I am not going to Lord’s,” said Jack. Which was true. “I have come up this way to see an invalid passenger who is going out in my ship.”

“Oh,” quoth Vera, “I thought what a nice idle time you were having of it. Mind, Johnny Ludlow, that you take me in to dinner to-night. I have something to tell you.”

Close upon the dinner-hour named, seven, the Squire and I were again at Sir Dace Fontaine’s. Tanerton’s cab came dashing up at the same moment. Coralie was in the drawing-room alone, her white dress and herself resplendent in coral ornaments. Sir Dace came in, and the Squire began telling him about the cricket-match, saying he ought to have been there. Presently Sir Dace rang the bell.

“How is it that dinner’s late?” he asked sternly of Ozias—for Sir Dace liked to be served to the moment.

“The dinner only wait for Miss Verena, sir,” returned Ozias, “She no down yet.”

Sir Dace turned round sharply to look at the sofa behind him, where I sat with Coralie, talking in an undertone. He had not noticed, I suppose, but that both sisters were there.

“Let Miss Verena be told that we wait for her,” he said, waving his hand to Ozias.

Back came Ozias in a minute or two. “Miss Verena, she no upstairs, sir. She no anywhere.”

Of all the frowns that ever made a face ugly, the worst sat on Sir Dace Fontaine’s, as he turned to Coralie.

“Have you let her go out?” he asked.

“Why of course she is not out, papa,” answered Coralie, calm and smiling as usual.

“Let Esther go into Miss Verena’s room, Ozias, and ask her to come down at once.”

“Esther go this last time, Miss Coralie. She come down and say, Ozias, Miss Verena no upstairs at all; she go out.”

“How dare——” began Sir Dace; but Coralie interrupted him.

“Papa, I will go and see. I am sure Verena cannot be out; I am sure she is not. She went into her room to dress when I went into mine. She came to me while she was dressing asking me to lend her my pearl comb; she had just broken one of the teeth of her own. She meant to come down to dinner then and was dressing for it: she had no thought of going out.”

Coralie halted at the door to say all this, and then ran up the stairs. She came down crest-fallen. Verena had stolen a march on them. In Sir Dace Fontaine’s passionate anger, he explained the whole to us, taking but a few short sentences to do it. Verena had been beguiled into a marriage engagement with Edward Pym: he, Sir Dace, had forbidden her to go out of the house to meet him; and, as it appeared, she had set his authority at defiance. They were no doubt tramping off now to some place of amusement; a theatre, perhaps: the past evening they had gone to Madame Tussaud’s. “Will you take in Miss Fontaine, Squire?” concluded Sir Dace, with never a break between that and the explanation.

How dark and sullen he looked, I can recall even now. Deprived of my promised partner, Verena, I went down alone. Sir Dace following with Jack, into whose arm he put his own.

“I wish you joy of your chief officer, Captain Tanerton!” cried he, a sardonic smile on his lips.

It must have been, I suppose, about nine o’clock. We were all back in the drawing-room, and Coralie had been singing. But somehow the song fell flat; the contretemps about Verena, or perhaps the sullenness it had left on Sir Dace, produced a sense of general discomfort; and nobody asked for another. Coralie took her dainty work-box off a side-table, and sat down by me on the sofa.

“I may as well take up my netting, as not,” she said to me in an undertone. “Verena began a new collar to-day—which she will be six months finishing, if she ever finishes it at all. She dislikes the work; I love it.” Netting was the work most in vogue at that time. Mrs. Todhetley had just netted herself a cap.

“Do you think we shall see your sister to-night?” I asked of Coralie in a whisper.

“Of course you will, if you don’t run away too soon. She’ll not come in later than ten o’clock.”

“Don’t you fancy that it has put out Sir Dace very much?”

Coralie nodded. “It is something new for papa to attempt to control us; and he does not like to find he can’t. In this affair I take his part; not Verena’s. Edward Pym is not a suitable match for her in any way. For myself, I dislike him.”

“I don’t much like him, either; and I am sure Captain Tanerton does not. Your sister is in love with him, and can see no fault. Cupid’s eyes are blind, you know.”

“I don’t know it at all,” she laughed. “My turn with Cupid has not yet come, Johnny Ludlow. I do not much think Cupid could blind me, though he may be blind himself. If—why, what’s this?”

Slowly lifting the lid of the box, which had been resting on her lap unopened, she saw a sealed note there, lying uppermost, above the netting paraphernalia. It was addressed to herself, in Verena’s handwriting. Coralie opened it with her usual deliberation.

“Dear Coralie,

“As I find you and papa intend to keep me a prisoner, and as I do not choose to be kept a prisoner, and do not think you have any right to exercise this harsh control over me, I am leaving home for a few days. Tell papa that I shall be perfectly safe and well taken care of, even if I could not take care of myself—which I can, as you must know.

“Ever yours,
“Vera.”

Coralie laughed just a little. It seemed as if nothing ever put her out: she did know that Verena could, as the note phrased it, take care of herself. She went up to her father, who was standing by the fire talking with the Squire and Tanerton. Sir Dace, fresh from a hot country, was always chilly, as I have said before, and kept up a big fire whether it was warm or cold.

“Papa, here is a note from Verena. I have just found it in my work-box. Would you like to see what she says?”

Sir Dace put his coffee-cup on the mantelpiece, and took the note from Coralie. I never saw any expression like that of his face as he read. I never saw any face go so darkly white. Evidently he did not take the news in the same light way that Coralie did.

A cry broke from him. Staggering back against the shelf, he upset a vase that stood at the corner. A beautiful vase of Worcester china, with a ground of delicate gilt tracery, and a deliciously-painted landscape standing out from it. It was not at the vase, lying in pieces on the fender, we looked, but at Sir Dace. His face was contorted; his eyes were rolling. Tanerton, ever ready, caught his arm.

“Help me to find her, my friends!” he gasped, when the threatened fit had passed. “Help me this night to find my daughter! As sure as we are living, that base man will marry her to-morrow, if we do not, and then it will be too late.”

“Goodness bless me, yes!” cried the Squire, brushing his hair the wrong way, his good old red face all excitement, “Let us start at once! Johnny, you come with me. Where can we go first?”

That was the question for them all—where to go? London was a large place; and to set out to look for a young lady in it, not knowing where to look, was as bad as looking for the needle in the bottle of hay.

“She may be at that villain’s place,” panted Sir Dace, whose breath seemed to be all wrong. “Where does he live? You know, I suppose,” appealing to Jack.

“No, I don’t,” said Jack. “But I can find out. I dare say it is in Ship Street. Most of——”

“Where is Ship Street?” interrupted the Squire, looking more helpless than a lunatic.

“Ship Street, Tower Hill,” explained Jack; and I dare say the Squire was as wise as before. “Quite a colony of officers live there, while their vessels are lying in St. Katherine’s Docks. Ship Street lies handy, you see; they have to be on board by six in the morning.”

“I knew a young fellow who lodged all the way down at Poplar, because it was near to his ship,” contended the Squire.

“No doubt. His ship must have been berthed in the East India Docks; they are much further off. I will go away at once, then. But,” added Jack, arresting his steps, and turning to Sir Dace, “don’t you think it may be as well to question the household? Your daughter may have left some indication of her movements.”

Jack’s thought was not a bad one. Coralie rang the bell for their own maid, Esther, a dull, silent kind of young woman. But Esther knew nothing. She had not helped Miss Verena to dress that evening, only Miss Coralie. Miss Verena said she did not want her. She believed Maria saw her go out.

Maria, the housemaid, was called: a smart young woman, with curled hair and a pink bow in her cap. Her tale was this. While the young ladies were dressing for dinner, she entered the drawing-room to attend to the fire, and found it very low. She went on her knees to coax it up, when Miss Verena came in in her white petticoat, a little shawl on her neck. She walked straight up to Miss Fontaine’s work-box, opened it and shut it, and then went out of the room again.

“Did she speak to you?” asked John Tanerton.

“Yes, sir. Leastways she made just a remark—‘What, that fire out again?’ she said. That was all, sir.”

“Go on,” sharply cried Sir Dace.

“About ten minutes later, I was at the front-door, letting out the water-rate—who is sure to call, as my missis told him, at the most ill-convenient time—when Miss Verena came softly down the stairs with her bonnet and mantle on. I felt surprised. ‘Don’t shut me in, Maria, when I want to go out,’ she said to me in a laughing sort of way, and I pulled the door back and begged her pardon. That was all, sir.”

“How was she dressed?” asked Coralie.

“I couldn’t say,” answered the girl; “except that her clothes were dark. Her black veil was down over her face; I noticed that; and she had a little carpet-bag in her hand.”

So there we were, no wiser than before. Verena had taken flight, and it was impossible to say whither.

They were for running all over the world. The Squire would have started forthwith, and taken the top of the Monument to begin with. John Tanerton, departing on his search to find Pym’s lodgings, found we all meant to attend him, including Ozias.

“Better let me go alone,” said Jack. “I am Pym’s master at sea, and can perhaps exercise some little authority on shore. Johnny Ludlow can go with me.”

“And you, papa, and Mr. Todhetley might pay a visit to Madame Tussaud’s,” put in Coralie, who had not lost her equanimity the least in the world, seeming to look upon the escapade as more of a joke than otherwise. “They will very probably be found at Madame Tussaud’s: it is a safe place of resort when people want to talk secrets and be under shelter.”

There might be reason in what Coralie said. Certainly there was no need for a procession of live people and two cabs to invade the regions of Tower Hill. So Jack, buttoning his light over-coat over his dinner toggery, got into a hansom with me, and the two old gentlemen went off to see the kings and queens.

“Drive like the wind,” said Jack to the cabman. “No. 23, Ship Street, Tower Hill.”

“I thought you did not know his number,” I said, as we went skimming over the stones.

“I do not know Pym’s: am not sure that he puts up in Ship Street. My second mate, Mark Ferrar, lives at No. 23, and I dare say he can direct me to Pym’s.”

Mark Ferrar! The name struck on my memory. “Does Ferrar come from Worcester, do you know, Jack? Is he related to the Battleys of Crabb?”

“It is the same,” said Jack. “I have heard his history. One of his especial favourites is Mr. Johnny Ludlow.”

“How strange!—strange that he should be in your ship! Does he do well? Is he a good sailor?”

“First-rate. Ferrar is really a superior young man, steady and painstaking, and has got on wonderfully. As soon as he qualifies for master, which will be in another year or two, he will be placed in command, unless I am mistaken. Our owners see what he is, and push him forward. They drafted him into my ship two years ago.”

How curious it was! Mark Ferrar, the humble charity-boy, the frog, who had won the heart of poor King Sanker, rising thus quickly towards the top of the tree! I had always liked Mark; had seen how trustworthy he was.

Our cab might fly like the wind; but Tower Hill seemed a long way off in spite of it. Dashing into Ship Street at last, I looked about me, and saw a narrow street with narrow houses on either side, narrow doors that somehow did not look upright, and shutters closed before the downstairs windows.

No. 23. Jack got out, and knocked at the door. A young boy opened it, saying he believed Mr. Ferrar was in his parlour.

You had to dive down a step to get into the passage. I followed Jack in. The parlour-door was on the right, and the boy pushed it open. A smart, well-dressed sailor sat at the table, his head bent over books and papers, apparently doing exercises by candle-light.

It was Mark Ferrar. His honest, homely face, with the wide mouth and plain features, looked much the same; but the face was softened into—I had almost said—that of a gentleman. Mark finished the sentence he was writing, looked up, and saw his captain.

“Oh, sir, is it you?” he said, rising. “I beg your pardon.”

“Busy at your books, I see, Mr. Ferrar?”

Mark smiled—the great, broad, genuine smile I so well remembered. “I had to put them by for other books, while I was studying to pass for chief, sir. That done, I can get to them again with an easy conscience.”

“To be sure. Can you tell me where Mr. Pym lodges?”

“Close by: a few doors lower down. But I can show you the house, sir.”

“Have you forgotten me, Mark?” I asked, as he took up his cap to come with us.

An instant’s uncertain gaze; the candle was behind him, and my face in the shade. His own face lighted up with a glad light.

“No, sir, that indeed I have not, I can never forget Mr. Johnny Ludlow. But you are about the last person, sir, I should have expected to see here.”

In the moment’s impulse, he had put out his hand to me; then, remembering, I suppose, what his position was in the old days, drew it back quickly. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, with the same honest flush that used to be for ever making a scarlet poppy of his face. But I was glad to shake hands with Mark Ferrar.

“How are all your people at Worcester, Mark?” I asked, as we went down the street.

“Quite well, thank you, sir. My old father is hearty yet, and my brother and sister are both married. I went down to see them last week, and stayed a day or two.”

The greatest change in Ferrar lay in his diction. He spoke as we spoke. Associating now with men of education, he had taken care to catch up their tone and accent; and he was ever, afloat or ashore, striving to improve himself.

Ferrar opened Pym’s door without knocking, dived down the step, for the houses were precisely similar, and entered the parlour. He and Pym occupied the same apartments in each house: the parlour and the little bed-room behind it.

The parlour was in darkness, save for what light came into it from the street gas-lamp, for these shutters were not closed. Ferrar went into the passage and shouted out for the landlady, Mrs. Richenough. I thought it an odd name.

She came in from the kitchen at the end of the passage, carrying a candle. A neat little woman with grey hair and a puckered face; the sleeves of her brown gown were rolled up to the elbows, and she wore a check apron.

“Mr. Pym, sir?” she said, in answer to Ferrar. “He dressed hisself and went out when he’d swallowed down his tea. He always do go out, sir, the minute he’s swallowed it.”

“Do you expect him back to-night?” questioned Jack.

“Why yes, sir, I suppose so,” she answered, “he mostly comes in about eleven.”

“Has any young lady been here this evening, ma’am?” blandly continued Jack. “With Mr. Pym?—or to inquire for him?”

Mrs. Richenough resented the question. “A young lady!” she repeated, raising her voice. “Well, I’m sure! what next?”

“Take care: it is our captain who speaks to you,” whispered Ferrar in her ear; and the old woman dropped a curtsy to Jack. Captains are captains with the old landladies in Ship Street.

“Mr. Pym’s sister—or cousin,” amended Jack.

“And it’s humbly asking pardon of you, sir. I’m sure I took it to mean one of them fly-away girls that would like to be running after our young officers continual. No, sir; no young lady has been here for Mr. Pym, or with him.”

“We can wait a little while to see whether he comes in, I presume, ma’am,” said Jack.

Intimating that Mr. Pym’s captain was welcome to wait the whole night if he pleased, Mrs. Richenough lighted the lamp that stood on the table, shut the shutters, and made Jack another curtsy as she withdrew.

“Do you wish me to remain, sir?” asked Mark.

“Not at all,” was the captain’s answer. “There will be a good deal to do to-morrow, Mr. Ferrar: mind you are not late in getting on board.”

“No fear, sir,” replied Ferrar.

And he left us waiting.

III.

The dwellings in Ship Street, Tower Hill, may be regarded as desirable residences by the young merchant-seamen whose vessels are lying in the neighbouring clocks, but they certainly do not possess much attraction for the general eye.

Seated in Edward Pym’s parlour, the features of the room gradually impressed themselves upon my mind, and they remain there still. They would have remained, I think, without the dreadful tragedy that was so soon to take place in it. It was weary work waiting. Captain Tanerton, tired with his long and busy day, was nodding asleep in the opposite chair, and I had nothing to do but look about me.

It was a small room, rather shabby, the paper of a greenish cast, the faded carpet originally red: and the bedroom behind, as much as could be seen of it through the half-open door, looked smaller and poorer. The chairs were horsehair, the small table in the middle had a purple cloth on it, on which stood the lamp, that the landlady had just lighted. A carved ivory ornament, representing a procession of priests and singers, probably a present to Mrs. Richenough from some merchant-captain, stood under a glass shade on a bracket against the wall; the mantelpiece was garnished with a looking-glass and some china shepherds and shepherdesses. A monkey-jacket of Pym’s lay across the back of a chair; some books and his small desk were on the chiffonier. In the rooms above, as we learnt later, lodged a friend of Pym’s, one Alfred Saxby, who was looking out for a third mate’s berth.

At last Pym came in. Uncommonly surprised he seemed to see us sitting there, but not at all put out: he thought the captain had come down on some business connected with the ship. Jack quietly opened the ball; saying what he had to say.

“Yes, sir. I do know where Miss Verena Fontaine is, but I decline to say,” was Pym’s answer when he had listened.

“No, sir, nothing will induce me to say,” he added to further remonstrance, “and you cannot compel me. I am under your authority at sea, Captain Tanerton, but I am not on shore—and not at all in regard to my private affairs. Miss Verena Fontaine is under the protection of friends, and that is quite enough.”

Enough or not enough, this was the utmost we could get from him. His captain talked, and he talked, each of them in a civilly-cold way; but nothing more satisfactory came of it. Pym wound up by saying the young lady was his cousin, and he could take care of her without being interfered with.

“Do you trust him, Johnny Ludlow?” asked Jack, as we came away.

“I don’t trust him on the whole; not a bit of it. But he seems to speak truth in saying she is with friends.”

And, as the days went on, bringing no tidings of Verena, Sir Dace Fontaine grew angry as a raging tiger.

When a ship is going out of dock, she is more coquettish than a beauty in her teens. Not in herself, but in her movements. Advertised to sail to-day, you will be told she’ll not start until to-morrow; and when to-morrow comes the departure will be put off until the next day, perhaps to the next week.

Thus it was with the Rose of Delhi. From some uncompromising exigencies, whether connected with the cargo, the crew, the brokers, or any other of the unknown mysteries pertaining to ships, the day that was to have witnessed her departure—Thursday—did not witness it. The brokers, Freeman and Co., let it transpire on board that she would go out of dock the next morning. About mid-day Captain Tanerton presented himself at their office in Eastcheap.

“I shall not sail to-morrow—with your permission,” said he to Mr. James Freeman.

“Yes, you will—if she’s ready,” returned the broker. “Gould says she will be.”

“Gould may think so; I do not. But, whether she be ready or not, Mr. Freeman, I don’t intend to take her out to-morrow.”

The words might be decisive words, but the captain’s tone was genial as he spoke them, and his frank, pleasant smile sat on his face. Mr. Freeman looked at him. They valued Captain Tanerton as they perhaps valued no other master in their employ, these brothers Freeman; but James had a temper that was especially happy in contradiction.

“I suppose you’d like to say that you won’t go out on a Friday!”

“That’s just it,” said Jack.

“You are superstitious, Captain Tanerton,” mocked the broker.

“I am not,” answered Jack. “But I sail with those who are. Sailors are more foolish on this point than you can imagine: and I believe—I believe in my conscience—that ships, sailing on a Friday, have come to grief through their crew losing heart. No matter what impediment is met with—bad weather, accidents, what not—the men say at once it’s of no use, we sailed on a Friday. They lose their spirit, and their energy with it; and I say, Mr. Freeman, that vessels have been lost through this, which might have otherwise been saved. I will not go out of dock to-morrow; and I refuse to do it in your interest as much as in my own.”

“Oh, bother,” was all James Freeman rejoined. “You’ll have to go if she’s ready.”

But the words made an impression. James Freeman knew what sailors were nearly as well as Jack knew: and he could not help recalling to memory that beautiful ship of Freeman Brothers, the Lily of Japan. The Lily had been lost only six months ago; and those of her crew, who were saved, religiously stuck to it that the calamity was brought about through having sailed on a Friday.

The present question did not come to an issue. For, on the Friday morning, the Rose of Delhi was not ready for sea; would not be ready that day. On the Saturday morning she was not ready either; and it was finally decided that Monday should be the day of departure. On the Saturday afternoon Captain Tanerton ran down to Timberdale for four-and-twenty hours; Squire Todhetley, his visit to London over, travelling down by the same train.

Verena Fontaine had not yet turned up, and Sir Dace was nearly crazy. Not only was he angry at being thwarted, but one absorbing, special fear lay upon him—that she would come back a married woman. Pym was capable of any sin, he told the Squire and Coralie, even of buying the wedding-ring; and Verena was capable of letting it be put on her finger. “No, papa,” dissented Coralie in her equable manner, “Vera is too fond of money and of the good things money buys, to risk the loss of the best part of her fortune. She will not marry Pym until she is of age; be sure of that. When he has sailed she will come home safe and sound, and tell us where she has been.”

Captain Tanerton went down, I say, to Timberdale. He stayed at the Rectory with his wife and brother until the Sunday afternoon, and then returned to London. The Rose of Delhi was positively going out on Monday, so he had to be back—and, I may as well say here, that Jack, good-natured Jack, had invited me to go in her as far as Gravesend.

During that brief stay at Timberdale, Jack was not in his usual spirits. His wife, Alice, noticed it, and asked him whether anything was the matter. Not anything whatever, Jack readily answered. In truth there was not. At least, anything he could talk of. A weight lay on his spirits, and he could not account for it. The strong instinct, which had seemed to warn him against sailing with Pym again, had gradually left him since he knew that Pym was to sail, whether or not. In striving to make the best of it, he had thrown off the feeling: and the unaccountable depression that weighed him down could not arise from that cause. It was a strange thing altogether, this; one that never, in all his life, had he had any experience of; but it was not less strange than true.

Monday.—The Rose of Delhi lay in her place in the freshness of the sunny morning, making ready to go out of dock with the incoming tide. I went on board betimes: and I thought I had never been in such a bustling scene before. The sailors knew what they were about. I conclude, but to me it seemed all confusion. The captain I could not see anywhere; but his chief officer, Pym, seemed to be more busy than a certain common enemy of ours is said to be in a gale of wind.

“Is the captain not on board?” I asked of Mark Ferrar, as he was whisking past me on deck.

“Oh no, sir; not yet. The captain will not come on board till the last moment—if he does then.”

The words took me by surprise. “What do you mean, by saying ‘If he does then’?”

“He has so much to do, sir; he is at the office now, signing the bills of lading. If he can’t get done in time he will join at Gravesend when we take on some passengers. The captain is not wanted on board when we are going out of dock, Mr. Johnny,” added Ferrar, seeing my perplexed look. “The river-pilot takes the ship out.”

He pointed to the latter personage, just then making his appearance on deck. I wondered whether all river-pilots were like him. He was broad enough to make two ordinarily stout people; and his voice, from long continuous shouting, had become nothing less than a raven’s croak.

At the last moment, when the ship was getting away, and I had given the captain up, he came on board. How glad I was to see his handsome, kindly face!

“I’ve had a squeak for it, Johnny,” he laughed, as he shook my hand: “but I meant to go down with you if I could.”

Then came all the noise and stir of getting away: the croaking of the pilot alone distinguishable to my uninitiated ears. “Slack away the stern-line”—he called it starn. “Haul in head-rope.” “Here, carpenter, bear a hand, get the cork-fender over the quarter-gallery.” “What are you doing aft there?—why don’t you slack away that stern-line?” Every other moment it seemed to me that we were going to pitch into the craft in the pool, or they into us. However, we got on without mishap.

Captain Tanerton was crossing the ship, after holding a confab with the pilot, when a young man, whom he did not recognize, stepped aside out of his way, and touched his cap. The captain looked surprised, for the badge on the cap was the one worn by his own officers.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Mr. Saxby, if you please, sir.”

“Mr. Saxby! What do you do here?”

“Third mate, if you please, sir,” repeated the young man. “Your third mate, Mr. Jones, met with an accident yesterday; he broke his leg; and my friend, Pym, spoke of me to Mr. Gould.”

Captain Tanerton was not only surprised, but vexed. First, for the accident to Jones, who was a very decent young fellow; next, at his being superseded by a stranger, and a friend of Pym’s. He put a few questions, found the new man’s papers were in order, and so made the best of it.

“You will find me a good and considerate master, Mr. Saxby, if you do your duty with a will,” he said in a kind tone.

“I hope I shall, sir; I’ll try to,” answered the young man.

On we went swimmingly, in the wake of the tug-boat; but this desirable tranquillity was ere long destined to be marred.

On coming up from the state-room, as they called it, after regaling ourselves on a cold collation, the captain was pointing out to me something on shore, when one of the crew approached hastily, and touched his cap. I found it was the carpenter: a steady-looking man, who was fresh to the ship, having joined her half-an-hour before starting.

“Beg pardon, sir,” he began. “Might I ask you when this ship was pumped out last?”

“Why, she is never pumped out,” replied the captain.

“Well, sir,” returned the man, “it came into my head just now to sound her, and I find there’s two feet of water in the hold.”

“Nonsense,” said Jack: “you must be mistaken. Why, she has never made a cupful of water since she was built. We have to put water in her to keep her sweet.”

“Any way, sir, there’s two feet o’ water in her now.”

The captain looked at the man steadily for a moment, and then thought it might be as well to verify the assertion—or the contrary—himself, being a practical man. Taking the sounding-rod from the carpenter’s hand, he wiped it dry with an old bag lying near, and then proceeded to sound the well. Quite true: there were two feet of water. No time lost he. Ordering the carpenter to rig the pumps, he called all hands to man them.

For a quarter-of-an-hour, or twenty minutes, the pumps were worked without intermission; then the captain sounded, as before, doing it himself. There was no diminution of water—it stood at the same level as before pumping. Upon that, he and the carpenter went down into the hold, to listen along the ship’s sides, and discover, if they could, where the water was coming in. Five minutes later, Jack was on deck again, his face grave.

“It is coming in abreast of the main hatchway on the starboard side; we can hear it distinctly,” he said to the pilot. “I must order the ship back again: I think it right to do so.” And the broad pilot, who seemed a very taciturn pilot, made no demur to this, except a grunt. So the tug-boat was ordered to turn round and tow us back again.

“Where’s Mr. Pym?” cried the captain. “Mr. Pym!”

“Mr. Pym’s in the cabin, sir,” said the steward, who chanced to be passing.

“In the cabin!” echoed Jack, in an accent that seemed to imply the cabin was not Mr. Pym’s proper place just then. “Send him to me, if you please, steward.”

“Yes, sir,” replied the steward. But he did not obey with the readiness exacted on board ship. He hesitated, as if wanting to say something before turning away.

No Pym came. Jack grew impatient, and called out an order or two. Young Saxby came up, touching his cap, according to rule.

“Do you want me, sir?”

“I want Mr. Pym. He is below. Ask him to come to me instantly.”

It brought forth Pym. Jack’s head was turned away for a moment, and I saw what he did not. That Pym had a fiery face, and walked as if his limbs were slipping from under him.

“Oh, you are here at last, Mr. Pym—did you not receive my first message?” cried Jack, turning round. “The cargo must be broken out to find the place of leakage. See about it smartly: there’s no time to waste.”

Pym had caught hold of something at hand to enable him to stand steady. He had lost his wits, that was certain; for he stuttered out an answer to the effect that the cargo might be—hanged.

The captain saw his state then. Feeling a need of renovation possibly, after his morning’s exertions, Mr. Pym had been making free, a great deal too much so, with the bottled ale below, and had finished up with brandy-and-water.

The cargo might be hanged!

Captain Tanerton, his brow darkening, spoke a sharp, short, stern reprimand, and ordered Mr. Pym to his cabin.

What could have possessed Pym unless it might be the spirit that was in the brandy, nobody knew. He refused to obey, broke into open defiance, and gave Captain Tanerton sauce to his face.

“Take him below,” said the captain quietly, to those who were standing round. “Mr. Ferrar, you will lock Mr. Pym’s cabin-door, if you please, and bring me the key.”

This was done, and Mr. Pym encaged. He kicked at his cabin-door, and shook it; but he could not escape: he was a prisoner. He swore for a little while at the top of his voice; then he commenced some uproarious singing, and finally fell on his bed and went to sleep.

Hands were set to work to break out the cargo, which they piled on deck; and the source of the leakage was discovered. It seemed a slight thing, after all, to have caused so much commotion—nothing but an old treenail that had not been properly plugged-up. I said so to Ferrar.

“Ah, Mr. Johnny,” was Ferrar’s answering remark, his face and tone strangely serious, “slight as it may seem to you, it might have sunk us all this night, had we chanced to anchor off Gravesend.”

What with the pumps, that were kept at work, and the shifting of the cargo, and the hammering they made in stopping up the leak, we had enough to do this time. And about half-past three o’clock in the afternoon the brave ship, which had gone out so proudly with the tide, got back ignominiously with the end of it, and came to an anchor outside the graving-dock, there not being sufficient water to allow of her entering it. The damage was already three-parts repaired, and the ship would make her final start on the morrow.

“’Twas nothing but a good Providence could have put it into my head to sound the ship, sir,” remarked the carpenter, wiping his hot face, as he came on deck for something or other he needed. “But for that, we might none of us have seen the morning’s sun.”

Jack nodded. These special interpositions of God’s good care are not rare, though we do not always recognize them. And yet, but for that return back, the miserable calamity so soon to fall, would not have had the chance to take place.

Captain Tanerton caused himself to be rowed ashore, first of all ordering the door of his prisoner to be unfastened. I got into the waterman’s wherry with him, for I had nothing to stay on board for. And a fine ending it was to my day’s pleasuring!

“Never mind, Johnny,” he said, as we parted. “You can come with us again to-morrow, and I hope we shall have a more lucky start.”

Captain Tanerton went straight to the brokers’, saw Mr. James Freeman, and told him he would not take out Edward Pym. If he did, the man’s fate would probably be that of irons from Gravesend to Calcutta.

And James Freeman, a thorough foe to brandy-and-water when taken at wrong times, listened to reason, and gave not a word of dissent. He there and then made Ferrar chief mate, and put another one second in Ferrar’s place; a likely young man in their employ who was waiting for a berth. This perfectly satisfied Captain Tanerton, under the circumstances.

The captain was then rowed back to his ship. By that time it was five o’clock. He told Ferrar of the change; who thanked him heartily, a glow of satisfaction rising to his honest face.

“Where’s Pym?” asked the captain. “He must take his things out of the ship.”

“Pym is not on board, sir. Soon after you left, he came up and went ashore: he seemed to have pretty nearly slept off the drink. Sir Dace Fontaine is below,” added Ferrar, dropping his voice.

“Sir Dace Fontaine! Does he want me?”

“He wanted Mr. Pym, sir. He has been looking into every part of the ship: he is looking still. He fancies his daughter is concealed on board.”

“Oh, nonsense!” cried the captain; “he can’t fancy that. As if Miss Fontaine would come down here—and board ships!”

“She was on board yesterday, sir.”

“What!” cried the captain.

“Mr. Pym brought her on board yesterday afternoon, sir,” continued Ferrar, his voice as low as it could well go. “He was showing her about the ship.”

“How do you know this, Mr. Ferrar?”

“I was here, sir. Expecting to sail last week, I sent my traps on board. Yesterday, wanting a memorandum-book out of my desk, I came down for it. That’s how I saw them.”

Captain Tanerton, walking forward to meet Sir Dace, knitted his brow. Was Mr. Pym drawing the careless, light-headed girl into mischief? Sir Dace evidently thought so.

“I tell you, Captain Tanerton, she is quite likely to be on board, concealed as a stow-away,” persisted Sir Dace, in answer to the captain’s assurance that Verena was not, and could not be in the ship. “When you are safe away from land, she will come out of hiding and they will declare their marriage. That they are married, is only too likely. He brought her on board yesterday afternoon when the ship was lying in St. Katharine’s Dock.”

“Do you know that he did?” cried Jack, wondering whence Sir Dace got his information.

“I am told so. As I got up your ladder just now I inquired of the first man I saw, whether a young lady was on board. He said no, but that a young lady had come on board with Mr. Pym yesterday afternoon to see the ship. The man was your ship-keeper in dock.”

“How did you hear we had got back to-day, Sir Dace?”

“I came down this afternoon to search the ship before she sailed—I was under a misapprehension as to the time of her going out. The first thing I heard was, that the Rose of Delhi had gone and had come back again. Pym is capable, I say, of taking Verena out.”

“You may be easy on this point, Sir Dace,” returned Jack. “Pym does not go out in the ship: he is superseded.” And he gave the heads of what had occurred.

It did not tend to please Sir Dace. Edward Pym on the high seas would be a less formidable adversary than Edward Pym on land: and perhaps in his heart of hearts Sir Dace did not really believe his daughter would become a stow-away.

“Won’t you help me to find her? to save her?” gasped Sir Dace, in pitiful entreaty. “With this change—Pym not going out—I know not what trouble he may not draw her into. Coralie says Verena is not married; but I—Heaven help me! I know not what to think. I must find Pym this night and watch his movements, and find her if I can. You must help me.”

“I will help you,” said warm-hearted Jack—and he clasped hands upon it. “I will undertake to find Pym. And, that your daughter is not on board, Sir Dace, I pass you my word.”

Sir Dace stepped into the wherry again, to be rowed ashore and get home to his dinner—ordered that evening for six o’clock. In a short while Jack also quitted the ship, and went to Pym’s lodgings in Ship Street. Pym was not there.

Mr. Pym had come in that afternoon, said his landlady, Mrs. Richenough, and startled her out of her seven senses; for, knowing the ship had left with the day’s tide, she had supposed Mr. Pym to be then off Gravesend, or thereabouts. He told her the ship had sprung a leak and put back again. Mr. Pym had gone out, she added, after drinking a potful of strong tea.

“To sober him,” thought the captain. “Do you expect him back to sleep, Mrs. Richenough?”

“Yes, I do, sir. I took the sheets off his bed this morning, and I’ve just been and put ’em on again. Mr. Saxby’s must be put on too, for he looked in to say he should sleep here.”

Where to search for Pym, Jack did not know. Possibly he might have gone back to the ship to offer an apology, now that he was sobered. Jack was bending his steps towards it when he met Ferrar: who told him Pym had not gone back.

Jack put on his considering-cap. He hardly knew what to do, or how to find the fugitives: with Sir Dace, he deemed it highly necessary that Verena should be found.

“Have you anything particular to do to-night, Mr. Ferrar?” he suddenly asked. And Ferrar said he had not.

“Then,” continued the captain, “I wish you would search for Pym.” And, knowing Ferrar was thoroughly trustworthy, he whispered a few confidential words of Sir Dace Fontaine’s fear and trouble. “I am going to look for him myself,” added Jack, “though I’m sure I don’t know in what quarter. If you do come across him, keep him within view. You can tell him also that his place on the Rose of Delhi is filled up, and he must take his things out of her.”

Altogether that had been a somewhat momentous day for Mr. Alfred Saxby—and its events for him were not over yet. He had been appointed to a good ship, and the ship had made a false start, and was back again. An uncle and aunt of his lived at Clapham, and he thought he could not do better than go down there and regale them with the news: we all naturally burn to impart marvels to the world, you know. However, when he reached his relatives’ residence, he found they were out; and not long after nine o’clock he was back at Mrs. Richenough’s.

“Is Mr. Pym in?” he asked of the landlady; who came forward rubbing her eyes as though she were sleepy, and gave him his candle.

“Oh, he have been in some little time, sir. And a fine row he’s been having with his skipper,” added Mrs. Richenough, who sometimes came off the high ropes of politeness when she had disposed of her supper beer.

“A row, has he!” returned Saxby. “Does not like to have been superseded,” he added to himself. “I must say Pym was a fool to-day—to go and drink, as he did, and to sauce the master.”

“Screeching out at one another like mad, they’ve been,” pursued Mrs. Richenough. “He do talk stern, that skipper, for a young man and a good-looking one.”

“Is the captain in there now?”

“For all I know. I did think I heard the door shut, but it might have been my fancy. Good-night, sir. Pleasant dreams.”

Leaving the candle in Saxby’s hands, she returned to her kitchen, which was built out at the back. He halted at the parlour-door to listen. No voices were to be heard then; no sounds.

“Pym may have gone to bed—I dare say his head aches,” thought Saxby: and he opened the door to see whether the parlour was empty.

Why! what was it?—what was the matter? The young man took one startled look around and then put down the candle, his heart leaping into his mouth.

The lamp on the table threw its bright light on the little room. Some scuffle appeared to have taken place in it. A chair was overturned; the ivory ornament with its glass shade had been swept from its stand to the floor: and by its side lay Edward Pym—dead.

Mr. Alfred Saxby, third mate of that good ship, the Rose of Delhi, might be a sufficiently self-possessed individual when encountering sudden surprises at sea; but he certainly did not show himself to be so on shore. When the state of affairs had sufficiently impressed itself on his startled senses, he burst out of the room in mortal terror, shouting out “murder.”

There was nobody in the house to hear him but Mrs. Richenough. She came forward, slightly overcome by drowsiness; but the sight she saw woke her up effectually.

“Good mercy!” cried she, running to the prostrate man. “Is he dead?”

“He looks dead,” shivered Mr. Saxby, hardly knowing whether he was not dead himself.

They raised Pym’s head, and put a pillow under it. The landlady wrung her hands.

“We must have a doctor,” she cried: “but I can see he is dead. This comes of that quarrel with his captain: I heard them raving frightfully at one another. There has been a scuffle here—see that chair. Oh! and look at my beautiful ivory knocked down!—and the shade all broke to atoms!”

“I’ll fetch Mr. Ferrar,” cried Saxby, feeling himself rather powerless to act; and with nobody to aid him but the gabbling woman.

Like mad, Saxby tore up the street, burst in at Mark Ferrar’s open door and went full butt against Mark himself; who was at the moment turning quickly out of it.

“Take care, Saxby. What are you about?”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake do come, Mr. Ferrar! Pym is dead. He is lying dead on the floor.”

The first thing Ferrar did was to scan his junior officer narrowly, wondering whether he could be quite sober. Yes, he seemed to be that; but agitated to trembling, and his face as pale as death. The next minute Ferrar was bending over Pym. Alas, he saw too truly that life was extinct.

“It’s his skipper that has done it, sir,” repeated the landlady.

“Hush, Mrs. Richenough!” rebuked Ferrar. “Captain Tanerton has not done this.”

“But I heard ’em screeching and howling at one another, sir,” persisted Mrs. Richenough. “Their quarrel must have come to blows.”

“I do not believe it,” dissented Ferrar. “Captain Tanerton would not be capable of anything of the kind. Fight with a man who has served under him!—you don’t understand things, Mrs. Richenough.”

Saxby had run for the nearest medical man. Ferrar ran to find his captain. He knew that Captain Tanerton intended to put up at a small hotel in the Minories for the night.

To this hotel went Ferrar, and found Captain Tanerton. Tired with his evening’s search after Pym, the captain was taking some refreshment, before going up to Sir Dace Fontaine’s—which he had promised, in Sir Dace’s anxiety, to do. He received Ferrar’s report—that Pym was dead—with incredulity: did not appear to believe it: but he betrayed no embarrassment, or any other guilty sign.

“Why, I came straight here from Pym,” he observed. “It’s hardly twenty minutes since I left him. He was all right then—except that he had been having more drink.”

“Old Mother Richenough says, sir, that Pym and you had a loud quarrel.”

“Say that, does she,” returned the captain carelessly. “Her ears must have deceived her, Mr. Ferrar.”

“A quarrel and fight she says, sir. I told her I knew better.”

Captain Tanerton took his cap and started with Ferrar for Ship Street, plunging into a reverie. Presently he began to speak—as if he wished to account for his own movements.

“When you left me, Mr. Ferrar—you know”—and here he exchanged a significant glance with his new first mate—“I went on to Ship Street, and took a look at Pym’s room. A lamp was shining on the table, and his landlady had the window open, closing the shutters. This gave me an opportunity of seeing inside. Pym I saw; but not—not anyone else.”

Again Captain Tanerton’s tone was significant. Ferrar appeared to understand it perfectly. It looked as though they had some secret understanding between them which they did not care to talk of openly. The captain resumed.

“After fastening the shutters, Mrs. Richenough came to the door—for a breath of air, she remarked, as she saw me: and she positively denied, in answer to my questions, that any young lady was there. Mr. Pym had never had a young lady come after him at all, she protested, whether sister or cousin, or what not.”

“Yes, sir,” said Ferrar: for the captain had paused.

“I went in, and spoke to Pym. But, I saw in a moment that he had been drinking again. He was not in a state to be reasoned with, or talked to. I asked him but one question, and asked it civilly: would he tell me where Verena Fontaine was. Pym replied in an unwilling tone; he was evidently sulky. Verena Fontaine was at home again with her people; and he had not been able, for that reason, to see her. Thinking the ship had gone away, and he with it, Verena had returned home early in the afternoon. That was the substance of his answer.”

“But I—I don’t know whether that account can be true, sir,” hesitated Ferrar. “I was not sure, you know, sir, that it was the young lady; I said so——”

“Yes, yes, I understood that,” interrupted the captain quickly. “Well, it was what Pym said to me,” he added, after a pause: “one hardly knows what to believe. However, she was not there, so far as I could ascertain and judge; and I left Pym and came up here to my hotel. I was not two minutes with him.”

“Then—did no quarrel take place, sir?” cried Ferrar, thinking of the landlady’s story.

“Not an angry word.”

At this moment, as they were turning into Ship Street, Saxby, who seemed completely off his head, ran full tilt against Ferrar. It was all over, he cried out in excitement, as he turned back with them: the doctor pronounced Pym to be really dead.

“It is a dreadful thing,” said the captain. “And, seemingly, a mysterious one.”

“Oh, it is dreadful,” asserted young Saxby. “What will poor Miss Verena do? I saw her just now,” he added, dropping his voice.

“Saw her where?” asked the captain, taking a step backwards.

“In the place where I’ve just met you, sir,” replied Saxby. “I was running past round the corner into the street, on my way home from Clapham, when a young lady met and passed me, going pretty nearly as quick as I was. She had her face muffled in a black veil, but I am nearly sure it was Miss Verena Fontaine. I thought she must be coming from Pym’s lodgings here.”

Captain Tanerton and his chief mate exchanged glances of intelligence under the light of the street gas-lamp. The former then turned to Saxby.

“Mr. Saxby,” said he, “I would advise you not to mention this little incident. It would not, I am sure, be pleasant to Miss Verena Fontaine’s friends to hear of it. And, after all, you are not sure that it was she.”

“Very true, sir,” replied Saxby. “I’ll not speak of it again.”

“You hear, sir,” answered Ferrar softly, as Saxby stepped on to open the house-door. “This seems to bear out what I said. And, by the way, sir, I also saw——”

“Hush!” cautiously interrupted the captain—for they had reached the door, and Mrs. Richenough stood at it.

And what Mr. Ferrar further saw, whatever it might be, was not heard by Captain Tanerton. There was no present opportunity for private conversation: and Ferrar was away in the morning with the Rose of Delhi.

After parting with Captain Tanerton on leaving the ship, I made my way to the Mansion House, took an omnibus to Covent Garden, and called at the Tavistock to tell Mr. Brandon of the return of the ship. Mr. Brandon kept me to dinner. About eight o’clock I left him, and went to the Marylebone Road to see the Fontaines. Coralie was in the drawing-room alone.

“Is it you, Johnny Ludlow!” she gaily cried, when old Ozias showed me in. “You are as welcome as flowers in May. Here I am, without a soul to speak to. You must have a game at chess with me.”

“Your sister is not come home, then?”

“Not she. I thought it likely she would come, as soon as the ship’s head was turned seaward—I told you so. But she has not. And now the ship’s back again, I hear. A fine time you must have had of it!”

“We just had. But how did you know?”

“From papa. Papa betook himself to the docks this afternoon, to assure himself, I presume, that the Rose of Delhi was gone. And my belief is, Johnny, that he will work himself into a nervous fever,” Coralie broke off to say, in her equable way, as she helped me to place the pieces. “When he got there, he found the ship was back again. This put him out a little, as you may judge; and something else put him out more. He heard that Vera went on board with Pym yesterday afternoon when the ship was lying in St. Katherine’s Docks. Upon that, what notion do you suppose he took up? I have first move, don’t I?”

“Certainly. What notion did he take up?” The reader must remember that I knew nothing of Sir Dace’s visit to the ship.

“Why, that Vera might be resolving to convert herself into a stowaway, and go out with Pym and the ship. Poor papa! He went searching all over the vessel. He must be off his head.”

“Verena would not do that.”

“Do it?” retorted Coralie. “She’d be no more likely to do it than to go up a chimney, as the sweeps do. I told papa so. He brought me this news when he came home to dinner. And he might just as well have stayed away, for all he ate.”

Coralie paused to look at her game. I said nothing.

“He could only drink. It was as if he had a fierce thirst upon him. When the sweets came on, he left the table and shut himself in his little library. I sent Ozias to ask if he would have a cup of tea or coffee made; papa swore at poor Ozias, and locked the door upon him. When Verena does appear I’d not say but he’ll beat her.”

“No, no: not that.”

“But, I tell you he is off his head. He is still shut up: and nobody dare go near him when he gets into a fit of temper. It is so silly of papa! Verena is all right. But this disobedience, you see, is something new to him.”

“You can’t move that bishop. It leaves your king in check.”

“So it does. The worst item of news remains behind,” added Coralie. “And that is that Pym does not sail with the ship.”

“I should not think he would now. Captain Tanerton would not take him.”

“Papa told me Captain Tanerton had caused him to be superseded. Was Pym very much the worse for what he took, Johnny? Was he very insolent? You must have seen it all?”

“He had taken quite enough. And he was about as insolent as a man can be.”

“Ferrar is appointed to his place, papa says; and a new man to Ferrar’s.”

“Ferrar is! I am glad of that: very. He deserves to get on.”

“But Ferrar is not a gentleman, is he?” objected Coralie.

“Not in one sense. There are gentlemen and gentlemen. Mark Ferrar is very humble as regards birth and bringing-up. His father is a journeyman china-painter at one of the Worcester china-factories; and Mark got his learning at St. Peter’s charity-school. But every instinct Mark possesses is that of a refined, kindly, modest gentleman; and he has contrived to improve himself so greatly by dint of study and observation, that he might now pass for a gentleman in any society. Some men, whatever may be their later advantages, can never throw off the common tone and manner of early habits and associations. Ferrar has succeeded in doing it.”

“If Pym stays on shore it may bring us further complication,” mused Coralie. “I should search for Verena myself then—and search in earnest. Papa and old Ozias have gone about it in anything but a likely manner.”

“Have you any notion where she can be?”

“Just the least bit of notion in the world,” laughed Coralie. “It flashed across me the other night where she might have hidden herself. I don’t know it. I have no particular ground to go upon.”

“You did not tell Sir Dace?”

“Not I,” lightly answered Coralie. “We two sisters don’t interfere with one another’s private affairs. I did keep back a letter of Vera’s; one she wrote to Pym when we first left home; but I have done so no more. Here comes some tea at last!”

“I should have told,” I continued in a low tone. “Or taken means myself to see whether my notion was right or wrong.”

“What did it signify?—when Pym was going away in a day or two. Check to you, Johnny Ludlow.”

That first game, what with talking and tea-drinking, was a long one. I won it. When Ozias came in for the tea-cups Coralie asked him whether Sir Dace had rung for anything. No, the man answered; most likely his master would remain locked in till bed-time; it was his way when any great thing put him out.

“I don’t think I can stay for another game,” I said to Coralie, as she began to place the men again.

“Are you in such a hurry?” cried Coralie, glancing round at the clock: which said twenty minutes to ten.

I was not in any hurry at all that night, as regarded myself: I had thought she might not care for me to stay longer. Miss Deveen and Cattledon had gone out to dinner some ten miles away, and were not expected home before midnight. So we began a fresh game.

“Why! that clock must have stopped!”

Chancing to look at it by-and-by, I saw that it stood at the same time—twenty minutes to ten. I took out my watch. It said just ten minutes past ten.

“What does it signify?” said Coralie. “You can stay here till twenty minutes to twelve if you like—and be whirled home in a cab by midnight then.”

That was true. If——

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Coralie.

She was looking at the door with surprised eyes. There stood Verena, her bonnet on; evidently just come in.

Verena tripped forward, bent down, and kissed her sister. “Have you been desperately angry, Coral?” she lightly asked, giving me her hand to shake. “I know papa has.”

“I have not been angry,” was Coralie’s equable answer: “but you have acted childishly, Verena. And now, where have you been?”

“Only in Woburn Place, at Mrs. Ball’s,” said Verena, throwing off her bonnet, and bringing her lovely flushed face close to the light as she sat down. “When I left here that evening—and really, Johnny, I was sorry not to stay and go in to dinner with you,” she broke off, with a smile—“I went straight to our old lodgings, to good old Mother Ball. ‘They are frightful tyrants at home,’ I said to her, ‘I’m not sure but they’ll serve me as Bluebeard did his wives; and I want to stay with you for a day or two.’ There’s where I have been all the time, Coral; and I wondered you and papa did not come to look for me.”

“It is where I fancied you might be,” returned Coral. “But I only thought of it on Saturday night. Does that mean check, Johnny?”

“Check and mate, mademoiselle.”

“Oh, how wicked you are!”

“Mrs. Ball has been more careful of me than she’d be of gold,” went on Vera, her blue eyes dancing. “The eldest daughter, Louise, is at home now: she teaches music in a school: and, if you’ll believe me, Coral, the old mother would never let me stir out without Louise. When Edward Pym came up in the evening to take me for a walk, Louise must go with us. ‘I feel responsible to your papa and sister, my dear,’ the old woman would say to me. Oh, she was a veritable dragon.”

“Was Louise with you when you went on board the Rose of Delhi yesterday afternoon?” cried Coralie, while I began to put away the chessmen.

Verena opened her eyes. “How did you hear of that? No, we tricked Louise for once. Edward had fifty things to say to me, and he wanted me alone. After dinner he proposed that we should go to afternoon service. I made haste, and went out with him, calling to Louise that she’d catch us up before we reached the church, and we ran off in just the contrary direction. “I should like to show you my ship,” Edward said; and we went down in an omnibus. Mrs. Ball shook her head when we got back, and said I must never do it again. As if I should have the chance, now Edward’s gone!”

Coralie glanced at her. “He is gone, I suppose?”

“Yes,” sighed Vera. “The ship left the docks this morning. He took leave of me last night.”

Coralie looked doubtful. She glanced again at her sister under her eyelids.

“Then—if Edward Pym is no longer here to take walks with you, Vera, how is it you came home so late to-night?”

“Because I have been to a concert,” cried Vera, her tone as gay as a lark’s. “Louise and I started to walk here this afternoon. I wanted you to see her; she is really very nice. Coming through Fitzroy Square, she called upon some friends of hers who live there, the Barretts—he is a professor of music. Mrs. Barrett was going to a concert to-night and she said if we would stay she’d take us. So we had tea with her and went to it, and they sent me home in a cab.”

“You seem to be taking your pleasure!” remarked Coralie.

“I had such an adventure downstairs,” cried Verena, dropping her voice after a pause of thought. “Nearly fell into the arms of papa.”

“What—now?”

“Now; two minutes ago. While hesitating whether to softly tinkle the kitchen-bell and smuggle myself in and up to my room, or to storm the house with a bold summons, Ozias drew open the front-door. He looked so glad to see me, poor stupid old fellow. I was talking to him in the passage when I heard papa’s cough. ‘Oh, hide yourself, Missee Vera,’ cried Ozias, ‘the master, he so angry;’ and away I rushed into papa’s little library, seeing the door of it open——”

“He has come out of it, then!” interjected Coralie.

“I thought papa would go upstairs,” said Vera. “Instead of that, he came on into the room. I crept behind the old red window-curtains, and——”

“And what?” asked Coralie, for Verena made a sudden pause.

“Groaned out with fright, and nearly betrayed myself,” continued Verena. “Papa stared at the curtains as if he thought they were alive, and then and there backed out of the room. Perhaps he feared a ghost was there. He was looking so strange, Coralie.”

“All your fault, child. Since the night you went away he has looked more like a maniac than a rational man, and acted like one. I have just said so to Johnny Ludlow.”

“Poor papa! I will be good and tractable as an angel now, and make it up to him. And—why, Coralie, here are visitors.”

We gazed in surprise. It is not usual to receive calls at bedtime. Ozias stood at the door showing in Captain Tanerton. Behind him was Alfred Saxby.

The captain’s manner was curious. No sooner did he set eyes on us than he started back, as if he thought we might bite him.

“Not here. Not the ladies. I told you it was Sir Dace I wanted,” he said in quick sentences to Ozias. “Sir Dace alone.”

Ozias went back down the stairs, and they after him, and were shown into the library. It was a little room nearly opposite the front-entrance, and underneath the room called the boudoir. You went down a few stairs to it.

Verena turned white. A prevision of evil seized her.

“Something must be the matter,” she shivered, laying her hand upon my arm. “Did you notice Captain Tanerton’s face? I never saw him look like that. And what does he do here? Where is the ship? And oh, Johnny”—and her voice rose to a shriek—“where’s Edward Pym?”

Alas! we soon knew what the matter was—and where Edward Pym was. Dead. Murdered. That’s what young Saxby called it. Sir Dace, looking frightfully scared, started with them down to Ship Street. I went also; I could not keep away. George was to sit up for me at home if I were late.

“For,” as Miss Deveen had said to me in the morning, laughingly, “there’s no telling, Johnny, at what unearthly hour you may get back from Gravesend.”

IV.

It was a dreadful thing to have happened. Edward Pym found dead; and no one could tell for a certainty who had been the author of the calamity.

He had died of a blow dealt to him, the doctors said: it had struck him behind the left ear. Could it be possible that he had fallen of himself, and struck his head against something in falling, was a question put to the doctors—and it was Captain Tanerton who put it. It perhaps might be possible, the medical men answered, but not at all probable. Mr. Pym could not have inflicted the blow upon himself, and there was no piece of furniture in the room, so far as they saw, that could have caused the injury, even though he had fallen upon it.

The good luck of the Rose of Delhi seemed not to be in the ascendant. Her commander could not sail with her now. Neither could her newly-appointed third mate, Alfred Saxby. So far as might be ascertained at present, Captain Tanerton was the last man who had seen Pym alive; Alfred Saxby had found him dead; therefore their evidence would be required at the official investigation.

Ships, however, cannot be lightly detained in port when their time for sailing comes: and on the day following the events already told of, the Rose of Delhi finally left the docks, all taut and sound, the only one of her old officers, sailing in her, being Mark Ferrar. The brokers were put out frightfully at the detention of Tanerton. A third mate was soon found to replace Saxby: a master not so easily. They put in an elderly man, just come home in command of one of their ships. Put him in for the nonce, hoping Captain Tanerton would be at liberty to join her at Dartmouth, or some other place down channel.

On this same day, Tuesday, the investigation into the events of that fatal Monday, as regarded Edward Pym, was begun. Not the coroner’s inquest: that was called for the morrow: but an informal inquiry instituted by the brokers and Sir Dace Fontaine. In a back-room of the office in Eastcheap, the people met; and—I am glad to say—I was one of them, or I could not have told you what passed. Sir Dace sat in the corner, his elbow resting on the desk and his hand partly covering his face. He did not pretend to feel the death as an affectionate uncle would have felt it; still Pym was his nephew, and there could be no mistake that the affair was troubling him.

Mrs. Richenough, clean as a new pin, in her Sunday gown and close bonnet, a puzzled look upon her wrinkled face, told what she knew—and was longer over it than she need have been. Mr. Pym, who lodged in her parlour floor, had left her for good, as she supposed, on the Monday morning, his ship, the Rose of Delhi, being about to go out of dock. Mr. Saxby, who had lodged in the rooms above Mr. Pym, got appointed to the same ship, and he also left. In the afternoon she heard that the ship had got off all right: a workman at the docks told her so. Later, who should come to the door but Mr. Pym—which naturally gave her great surprise. He told her the ship had sprung a leak and had put back; but they should be off again with the next day’s tide, and he should have to be abroad precious early in the morning to get the cargo stowed away again——

“What time was this?” interrupted Mr. Freeman.

“About half-past four, I fancy, sir. Mr. Pym spoke rather thick—I saw he had been taking a glass. He bade me make him a big potful of strong tea—which I did at once, having the kettle on the fire. He drank it, and went out.”

“Go on, Mrs. Richenough.”

“An hour afterwards, or so, his captain called, wanting to know where he was. Of course, sirs, I could not say; except that he had had a big jorum of tea, and was gone out.”

Captain Tanerton spoke up to confirm this. “I wanted Pym,” he said. “This must have been between half-past five and six o’clock.”

“About nine o’clock; or a bit earlier, it might be—I know it was dark and I had finished my supper—Mr. Pym came back,” resumed the landlady. “He seemed in an ill-humour, and he had been having more to drink. ‘Light my lamp, Mother Richenough,’ says he roughly, ‘and shut the shutters: I’ve got a letter to write.’ I lighted the lamp, and he got out some paper of his that was left in the table-drawer, and the ink, and sat down. After closing the shutters I went to the front-door, and there I saw Captain Tanerton. He asked me——”

“What did he ask you?” cried Mr. Freeman’s lawyer, for she had come to a dead standstill.

“Well, the captain asked me whether any young lady had been there. He had asked the same question afore, sir: Mr. Pym’s cousin, or sister, I b’lieve he meant. I told him No, and he went into the parlour to Mr. Pym.”

“What then?”

“Well, gentlemen, I went back to my kitchen, and shut myself in by my bit o’ fire; and, being all lonely like, I a’most dozed off. Not quite; they made so much noise in the parlour, quarrelling.”

“Quarrelling?” cried the lawyer.

“Yes, sir; and were roaring out at one another like wolves. Mr. ——”

“Stay a moment, ma’am. How long was it after you admitted Captain Tanerton that you heard this quarrelling?”

“Not above three or four minutes, sir. I’m sure of that. ‘Mr. Pym’s catching it from his captain, and he is just in the right mood to take it unkindly,’ I thought to myself. However, it was no business of mine. The sounds soon ceased, and I was just dozing off again, when Mr. Saxby came home. He went into the parlour to see Mr. Pym, and found him lying dead on the floor.”

A silent pause.

“You are sure, ma’am, it was Captain Tanerton who was quarrelling with him?” cried the lawyer, who asked more questions than all the rest put together.

“Of course I am sure,” returned Mrs. Richenough. “Why, sir, how could it be anybody else? Hadn’t I just let in Captain Tanerton to him? Nobody was there but their two selves.”

Naturally the room turned to Jack. He answered the mute appeal very quietly.

“It was not myself that quarrelled with Pym. No angry word of any kind passed between us. Pym had been drinking; Mrs. Richenough is right in that. He was not in a state to be reproved or reasoned with, and I came away at once. I did not stay to sit down.”

“You hear this, Mrs. Richenough?”

“Yes, sir, I do; and I am sure the gentleman don’t speak or look like one who could do such a deed. But, then, I heard the quarrelling.”

An argument indisputable to her own mind. Sir Dace looked up and put a question for the first time. He had listened in silence. His dark face had a wearied look on it, and he spoke hardly above a whisper.

“Did you know the voice to be that of Captain Tanerton, Mistress Landlady? Did you recognize it for his!”

“I knew the voice couldn’t be anybody else’s, sir. Nobody but the captain was with Mr. Pym.”

“I asked you whether you recognized it?” returned Sir Dace, knitting his brow. “Did you know by its tone that it was Captain Tanerton’s?”

“Well, no, sir, I did not, if you put it in that way. Captain Tanerton was nearly a stranger to me, and the two shut doors and the passage was between me and him. I had only heard him speak once or twice before, and then in a pleasant, ordinary voice. In this quarrel his voice was raised to a high, rough pitch; and in course I could not know it for his.”

“In point of fact, then, it comes to this: You did not recognize the voice for Captain Tanerton’s.”

“No, sir; not, I say, if you put it in that light.”

“Let me put it in this light,” was Sir Dace Fontaine’s testy rejoinder: “Had three or four people been with Mr. Pym in his parlour, you could not have told whose voice it was quarrelling with him? You would not have known?”

“That is so, sir. But, you see, I knew it was his captain that was with him.”

Sir Dace folded his arms and leaned back in his chair, his cross-questioning over. Mrs. Richenough was done with for the present, and Captain Tanerton entered upon his version of the night’s events.

“I wished particularly to see Mr. Pym, and went to Ship Street in search of him, as I have already said. He was not there. Later, I went down again——”

“I beg your pardon, Captain Tanerton,” interrupted the lawyer; “what time do you make it—that second visit?”

“It must have been nearly nine o’clock. Mr. Pym was at home, and I went into his parlour. He sat at the table writing, or preparing to write. I asked him the question I had come to ask, and he answered me. Scarcely anything more passed between us. He was three-parts tipsy. I had intended to tell him that he was no longer chief mate of my ship—had been superseded; but, seeing his condition, I did not. I can say positively that I was not more than two minutes in the room.”

“And you and he did not quarrel?”

“We did not. Neither were our voices raised. It is very probable, in his then condition, that he would have attempted to quarrel had he known he was discharged; but he did not know it. We were perfectly civil to each other; and when I wished him good-night, he came into the passage and shut the front-door after me.”

“You left no one with him?”

“No one; so far as I saw. I can answer for it that no one was in the parlour with us: whether any one was in the back room I cannot say. I do not think so.”

“After that, Captain Tanerton?”

“After that I went straight to my hotel in the Minories, and ordered tea. While taking it, Mr. Ferrar came in and told me Edward Pym was dead. I could not at first believe it. I went back to Ship Street and found it too true. In as short a time as I could manage it, I went to carry the news to Sir Dace Fontaine, taking young Saxby with me.”

Jack had spoken throughout in the ready, unembarrassed manner of one who tells a true tale. But never in all my life had I seen him so quiet and subdued. He was like one who has some great care upon him. The other hearers, not knowing Jack as I knew him, would not notice this; though I cannot answer for it that one of them did not James Freeman. He never took his eyes off Jack all the while; peered at him as if he were a curiosity. It was not an open stare; more of a surreptitious one, taken stealthily from under his eyebrows.

Some testimony as to Pym’s movements that afternoon was obtained from Mrs. Ball, the lawyer having already been to Woburn Place to get it. She said that young Pym came to her house between five and six o’clock nearer six than five, she thought, and seemed very much put out and disappointed to find Miss Verena Fontaine had left for her own home. He spoke of the ship’s having sprung a leak and put back again, but he believed she would get out again on the morrow. Mrs. Ball did not notice that he had been drinking; but one of her servants met him in the street after he left the house, heard him swearing to himself, and saw him turn into a public-house. If he remained in it until the time he next appeared in Ship Street, his state then was not to be wondered at.

This was about all that had been gathered at present. A great deal of talking took place, but no opinion was expressed by anybody. Time enough for that when the jury met on the morrow. As we were turning out of the back-room, the meeting over, Mr. Freeman put his hand upon Jack, to detain him. Jack, in his turn, detained me.

“Captain Tanerton,” he said, in a grave whisper, “do you remember making a remark to me not long ago, in this, my private room—that if we persisted in sending Pym out with you in the ship, there would be murder committed?”

“I believe I do,” said Jack, quietly. “They were foolish words, and meant nothing.”

“I do not like to remember them,” pursued Mr. Freeman. “As things have turned out, it would have been better that you had not used them.”

“Perhaps so,” answered Jack. “They have done no harm, that I know of.”

“They have been singularly verified. The man has been murdered.”

“Not on board the Rose of Delhi.”

“No. Off it.”

“I should rather call it death by misadventure,” said Jack, looking calmly at the broker. “At the worst, done in a scuffle; possibly in a fall.”

“Most people, as I think you will find, will call it murder, Captain Tanerton.”

“I fear they will.”

Mr. Freeman stood before Jack, waiting—at least it struck me so—to hear him add, “But I did not commit it”—or words to that effect. I waited too. Jack never spoke them: he remained silent and still. Since the past day his manner had changed. All the light-hearted ease had gone out of it; the sunny temperament seemed exchanged for one of thought and gloom.

Fine tidings to travel down to Timberdale!

On Wednesday, the day following this, the Squire stood at the gate of Crabb Cot after breakfast, looking this way and that. Dark clouds were chasing each other over the face of the sky, now obscuring the sun, now leaving it to shine out with intense fierceness.

“It won’t do to-day,” cried the Squire. “It’s too windy, Joe. The fish would not bite.”

“They’d bite fast enough,” said Tod, who had set his mind upon a day’s fishing, and wanted the Squire to go with him.

“Feel that gust, Joe! Why, if—halloa, here comes Letsom!”

Colonel Letsom was approaching at the pace of a steam-engine, his mild face longer than usual. Tod laughed.

The colonel, never remembering to say How d’ye do, or to shake hands, dragged two letters out of his pocket, all in a flurry.

“Such fearful news, Todhetley!” he exclaimed. “Pym—you remember that poor Pym?”

“What should hinder me?” cried the Squire. “A fine dance we had, looking for him and Verena Fontaine the other night in London! What of Pym!”

“He is dead!” gasped the colonel. “Murdered.”

The pater took off his spectacles, thinking they must affect his hearing, and stared.

“And it is thought,” added the colonel, “that—that Captain Tanerton did it.”

“Good mercy, Letsom! You can’t mean it.”

Colonel Letsom’s answer was to read out portions of the two letters. One of them was written to his daughter Mary Ann by Coralie Fontaine; three sheets full. She gave much the same history of the calamity that has been given above. It could not have been done by any hand but Captain Tanerton’s, she said; though of course not intentionally; nobody thought that: her father, Sir Dace, scorned any worse idea. Altogether, it was a dreadful thing; it had struck Verena into a kind of wild despair, and bewildered them all. And in a postscript she added what she had apparently forgotten to say before—that Captain Tanerton denied it.

Tod looked up, a flush on his face. “One thing may be relied upon, colonel—that if Tanerton did do it, he will avow it. He would never deny it.”

“This other letter is from Sir Dace,” said the colonel, after putting Coralie’s aside. And he turned round that we might look over his shoulder while he read it.

It gave a much shorter account than Coralie’s; a lighter account, as if he took a less grave view of the affair; and it concluded with these words: “Suspicion lies upon Tanerton. I think unjustly. Allowing that he did do it, it could only have been done by a smartly-provoked blow, devoid of ill-intention. No one knows better than myself how quarrelsome and overbearing that unfortunate young man was. But I, for one, believe what Tanerton says—that he was not even present when it happened. I am inclined to think that Pym, in his unsteady state, must in some way have fallen when alone, and struck his head fatally.”

“Sir Dace is right; I’ll lay my fortune upon it,” cried Tod warmly.

“Don’t talk quite so fast about your fortune, Joe; wait till you’ve got one,” rebuked the pater. “I must say it is grievous news, Letsom. It has upset me.”

“I am off now to show the letters to Paul,” said the colonel. “It will be but neighbourly, as he is a connection of the Fontaines.”

Shaking hands, he turned away on the road to Islip. The Squire, leaning on the gate, appeared to be looking after him: in reality he was deep in a brown study.

“Joe,” said he, in a tone that had a sound of awe in it, “this is curious, taken in conjunction with what Alice Tanerton told us yesterday morning.”

“Well, it does seem rather queer,” conceded Tod. “Something like the dream turning up trumps.”

“Trumps?” retorted the pater.

“Truth, then. Poor Alice!”

A singular thing had happened. Especially singular, taken in conjunction (as the Squire put it) with this unfortunate news. And when the reader hears the whole, though it won’t be just yet, he will be ready to call out, It is not true. But it is true. And this one only fact, with its truth and its singularity, induced me to recount the history.

On Tuesday morning, the day after the calamity in Ship Street—you perceive that we go back a day—the Squire and Tod turned out for a walk. They had no wish to go anywhere in particular, and their steps might just as well have been turned Crabb way as Timberdale way—or, for that matter, any other way. The morning was warm and bright: they strolled towards the Ravine, went through it, and so on to Timberdale.

“We may as well call and see how Herbert Tanerton is, as we are here,” remarked the Squire. For Herbert had a touch of hay-fever. He was always getting something or other.

The Rector was better. They found him pottering about his garden; that prolific back-garden from which we once saw—if you don’t forget it—poor, honest, simple-minded Jack bringing strawberries on a cabbage-leaf for crafty Aunt Dean. The suspected hay-fever turned out to be a bit of a cold in the head: but the Rector could not have looked more miserable had it been in the heart.

“What’s the matter with you now?” cried the Squire, who never gave in to Herbert’s fancies.

“Matter enough,” he growled in answer: “to have a crew of ridiculous women around you, no better than babies! Here’s Alice in a world of a way about Jack, proclaiming that some harm has happened to him.”

“What harm? Does she know of any?”

“No, she does not know of any,” croaked Herbert, flicking a growing gooseberry off a bush with the rake. “She says a dream disclosed it to her.”

The pater stared. Tod threw up his head with a laugh.

“You might have thought she’d got her death-warrant read out to her, so white and trembling did she come down,” continued Herbert in an injured tone. “She had dreamt a dream, foreshadowing evil to Jack, she began to tell us—and not a morsel of breakfast could she touch.”

“But that’s not like Alice,” continued the Squire. “She is too sensible: too practical for such folly.”

“It’s not like any rational woman. And Grace would have condoled with her! Women infect each other.”

“What was the dream?”

“Some nonsense or other, you may be sure. I would not let her relate it, to me, or to Grace. Alice burst into tears and called me hard-hearted. I came out here to get away from her.”

“For goodness’ sake don’t let her upset herself over a rubbishing dream, Tanerton,” cried the Squire, all sympathy. “She’s not strong, you know, just now. I dreamt one night the public hangman was appointed to take my head off; but it is on my shoulders yet. You tell her that.”

“Yesterday was the day Jack was to sail,” interrupted Tod.

“Of course it was,” acquiesced the Rector: “he must be half-way down the channel by this time. If—— Here comes Alice!” he broke off. “I shall go. I don’t want to hear more of such stuff.”

He went on down the garden in a huff, disappearing behind the kidney-beans. Alice, wearing a light print gown and black silk apron, her smooth brown hair glossy as ever, and her open face as pretty, shook hands with them both.

“And what’s this we hear about your tormenting yourself over a dream?” blundered the Squire. Though whether it was a blunder to say it, I know not; or whether, but for that, she would have spoken: once the ice is broken, you may plunge in easily. “My dear, I’d not have thought it of you.”

Alice’s face took a deeper gravity, her eyes a far-off look. “It is quite true, Mr. Todhetley,” she sighed. “I have been very much troubled by a dream.”

“Tell it us, Alice,” said Tod, his whole face in a laugh. “What was it about?”

“That you may ridicule it?” she sighed.

“Yes,” he answered. “Ridicule it out of you.”

“You cannot do that,” was her quiet answer: and Tod told me in later days that it rather took him aback to see her solemn sadness. “I should like to relate it to you, Mr. Todhetley. Herbert would not hear it, or let Grace.”

“Herbert’s a parson, you know, my dear, and parsons think they ought to be above such things,” was the Squire’s soothing answer. “If it will ease your mind to tell it me—— Here, let us sit down under the pear-tree.”

So they sat down on the bench under the blossoms of the pear-tree, the pater admonishing Tod to behave himself; and poor Alice told her dream.

“I thought it was the present time,” she began. “This very present day, say, or yesterday; and that Jack was going to sea in command——”

“But, my dear, he always goes in command.”

“Of course. But in the dream the point was especially presented to my mind—that he was going out in command. He came to me the morning of the day he was to sail, looking very patient, pale, and sorrowful. It seemed that he and I had had some dispute, causing estrangement, the previous night: it was over then, and I, for one, repented of the coldness.”

“Well, Alice?” broke in Tod: for she had stopped, and was gazing out straight before her.

“I wish I could show to you how real all this was,” she resumed. “It was more as though I were wide awake, and enacting it. I never had so vivid a dream before; never in all my life.”

“But why don’t you go on?”

“Somebody had been murdered: some man. I don’t know who it was—or where, or how. Jack was suspected. Jack! But it seemed that it could not be brought home to him. We were in a strange town; at least, it was strange to me, though it seemed that I had stayed in it once before, many years ago. Jack was standing before me all this while, you understand, in his sadness and sorrow. It was not he who had told me what had happened. I seemed to have known it already. Everybody knew it, everybody spoke of it, and we were in cruel distress. Suddenly I remembered that when I was in the town the previous time, the man who was murdered had had a bitter quarrel with another man, a gentleman: and a sort of revelation came over me that this gentleman had been the murderer. I went privately to some one who had authority in the ship, and said so; I think her owner. He laughed at me—did I know how high this gentleman was, he asked; the first magnate in the town. That he had done it I felt sure; surer than if I had seen it done; but no one would listen to me—and in the trouble I awoke.”

“That’s not much to be troubled at,” cried the Squire.

“The trouble was terrible; you could not feel such in real life. But I have not told all. Presently I got to sleep again, and found myself in the same dream. I was going through the streets of the town in an open carriage, the ship’s owner with me——”

“Was the ship the Rose of Delhi?”

“I don’t know. The owner, sitting with me in the carriage, was not either of the owners of the Rose of Delhi, whom I know well; this was a stranger. We were going over a bridge. Walking towards us on the pavement, I saw two gentlemen arm-in-arm: one an officer in a dusky old red uniform and cocked-hat; the other an evil-looking man who wore a long brown coat. He walked along with his eyes on the ground. I knew him by intuition—that it was the man who had had the quarrel years before, and who had done the murder now. ‘There’s the gentleman you would have accused,’ said my companion before I could speak, pointing to this man: ‘he stands higher in position than anybody else in the town.’ They walked on in their security, and we drove on in our pain. I ought to say in my pain, for I alone felt it. Oh, I cannot tell you what it was—this terrible pain; not felt so much, it seemed, because my husband could not be cleared, as for his sadness and sorrow. Nothing like it, I say, can ever be felt on earth.”

“And what else, Alice?”

“That is all,” she sighed. “I awoke for good then. But the pain and the fear remain with me.”

“Perhaps, child, you are not very well?—been eating green gooseberries, or some such trash. Nothing’s more likely to give one bad dreams than unripe fruit.”

“Why should the dream have left this impression of evil upon me—this weight of fear?” cried Alice, never so much as hearing the pater’s irreverent suggestion. “If it meant nothing, if it were not come as a warning, it would pass from my mind as other dreams pass.”

Not knowing what to say to this, the Squire said nothing. He and Tod both saw how useless it would be; no argument could shake her faith in the dream, and the impression it had left.

The Squire, more easily swayed than a child, yet suspecting nothing of the news that was on its way to Timberdale, quitted the Rectory and went home shaking his head. Alice’s solemn manner had told upon him. “I can’t make much out of the dream, Joe,” he remarked, as they walked back through the Ravine; “but I don’t say dreams are always to be ridiculed, since we read of dreams sent as warnings in the Bible. Anyhow, I hope Jack will make a good voyage. He has got home safe and sound from other voyages: why should he not from this one?”

Before that day was over, they saw Alice again. She walked over to Crabb Cot in the evening with her little girl—a sprightly child with Jack’s own honest and kindly eyes. Alice put a sealed paper into the Squire’s hand.

“I know you will think me silly,” she said to him, in a low tone: “perhaps gone a little out of my senses; but, as I told you this morning, nothing has ever impressed me so greatly and so unpleasantly as this dream. I cannot get it out of my mind for a moment; every hour, as it goes by, only serves to render it clearer. I have written it down here, every particular, more minutely than I related it to you this morning, and I have sealed it up, you see; and I am come to ask you to keep it. Should my husband ever be accused, it may serve to——”

“Now, child, don’t you talk nonsense,” interrupted the pater. “Accused of what?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did. I hope you will pardon me, Mr. Todhetley,” she went on, in deprecation; “but indeed there lies upon me a dread—an apprehension that startles me. I dare say I express myself badly; but it is there. And, do you know, Jack has lately experienced the same sensation; he told me so on Sunday. He said it was like an instinct of coming evil.”

“Then that accounts for it,” cried the Squire, considerably relieved, and wondering how Jack could be so silly, if she was. “If your husband told you that, Alice, of course the first thing you’d do would be to go and dream of it.”

“Perhaps so. What he said made no impression on me; he laughed as he said it: I don’t suppose it made much on him. Please keep the paper.”

The Squire carried the paper upstairs and locked it up in the little old walnut bureau in his bedroom. He told Alice where he had put it. And she, declining any refreshment, left again with little Polly for Timberdale Rectory.

“Has Herbert come to?” asked Tod laughingly, as he went to open the gate for her.

“Oh dear, no,” answered Alice. “He never will, if you mean as to hearing me tell the dream.”

They had a hot argument after she left: Mrs. Todhetley maintaining that some dreams were to be regarded as sacred things; while Tod ridiculed them with all his might, asserting that there never had been, and never could be anything in them to affect sensible people. The Squire, now taking one side, now veering to the other, remained in a state of vacillation, something like Mahomet’s coffin hovering between earth and heaven.

And, you will now readily understand that when the following morning, Wednesday, Colonel Letsom brought the Squire the news of Pym’s death, calling it murder, and that Jack was suspected, and the ship had gone out without him, this dream of Alice Tanerton’s took a new and not at all an agreeable prominence. Even Tod, sceptical Tod, allowed that it was “queer.”

On this same morning, Wednesday, Alice received a letter from her husband. He spoke of the mishap to the ship, said that she had put back, and had again gone out; he himself being detained in London on business, but he expected to be off in a day or two and join her at some place down channel. But not a word did he say of the cause of his detention, or of the death of Edward Pym. She heard it from others.

With this confirmation, as it seemed, of her dream, Alice took it up more warmly. She went over to the old lawyer at Islip, John Paul, recounted the dream to him, and asked what she was to do. Naturally, old Paul told her “nothing:” and he must have laughed in his sleeve as he said it.

The good ship, Rose of Delhi, finally went away with all her sails set for the East; but John Tanerton went not with her.

The inquest on the unfortunate young man, Pym, was put off from time to time, and prolonged and procrastinated. Captain Tanerton had to wait its pleasure; the ship could not.

The case presented difficulties, and the jury could not see their way to come to a verdict. Matters looked rather black against Captain Tanerton; that was not denied; but not sufficiently black, it would seem, for the law to lay hold of him. At any rate, the law did not. Perhaps the persistent advocacy of Sir Dace Fontaine went some way with the jury. Sir Dace gave it as his strong opinion that his misguided nephew, being the worse for drink, had fallen of himself, probably with his head on the iron fender, and that Captain Tanerton’s denial was a strictly true one. The end finally arrived at was—that there was not sufficient evidence to show how the death was caused.

At the close of the investigation Jack went down to Timberdale. Not the open-hearted, ready-handed Jack of the old days, but a subdued, saddened man who seemed to have a care upon him. The foolish speech he had thoughtlessly made to Mr. Freeman preceded him: and Herbert Tanerton—always looking on the darkest side of everything and everybody, considered it a proof that Jack had done the deed.

Timberdale (including Crabb) held opposite opinions; half of it taking Captain Tanerton’s side, half the contrary one. As to the Squire, he was more helpless than an old sheep. He had always liked Jack, had believed in him as in one of us: but, you see, when one gets into trouble, faith is apt to waver. A blow, argued the pater in private, is so easily given in the heat of passion.

“A pretty kettle of fish this is,” croaked Herbert to Jack, on his brother’s arrival.

“Yes, it is,” sighed Jack.

“The ship’s gone without you, I hear.”

“She had to go. Ships cannot be delayed to await the convenience of one man: you must know that, Herbert.”

“How came you to do it, John?”

“To do what?” asked Jack. “To stay? It was no fault of mine. I was one of the chief witnesses, and the coroner would not release me.”

“You know what I mean. Not that. How came you to do it, I ask?”

“To do what?” repeated Jack.

“Kill Pym.”

Jack’s face took a terrible shade of pain as he looked at his brother. “I should have thought, Herbert, that you, of all people, might have judged me better than that.”

“I don’t mean to say you did it deliberately; that you meant to do it,” returned the Rector in his coldest manner. “But that was a very awkward threat of yours—that if the brokers persisted in sending Pym out with you, there’d be murder committed. Very incautious!”

“You can’t mean what you say; you cannot surely reflect on what you would imply—that I spoke those words with intention!” flashed Jack.

“You did speak them—and they were verified,” contended Herbert. Just the same thing, you see, that Mr. Freeman had said to Jack in London. Poor Jack!

“How did you hear that I had said anything of the kind?”

“Somebody wrote it to Timberdale,” answered the parson, crustily. There could be no question that the affair had crossed him more than anything that had ever happened in this world. “I think it was Coralie Fontaine.”

“I am deeply sorry I ever spoke them, Herbert—as things have turned out.”

“No doubt you are. The tongue’s an evil and dangerous member. Let us drop the subject: the less it is recurred to now, the better.”

Captain Tanerton saw how it was—that all the world suspected him, beginning with his brother.

And he certainly did not do as much to combat the feeling as he might have done. This was noticed. He did not assert his innocence strenuously and earnestly. He said he was not guilty, it’s true, but he said it too quietly. A man accused of so terrible a crime would move heaven and earth to prove the charge false—if false it were. Jack denied his guilt, but denied it in a very tame fashion. And this had its effect upon his upholders.

There could be no mistaking that some inward trouble tormented him. His warm, genial manners had given place to thoughtfulness and care. Was Jack guilty?—his best friends acknowledged the doubt now, in the depths of their heart. Herbert Tanerton was worrying himself into a chronic fever: chiefly because disgrace was reflected on his immaculate self, Jack being his brother. Squire Todhetley, meeting Jack one day in Robert Ashton’s cornfield, took Jack’s hands in his, and whispered that if Jack did strike the blow unwittingly, he knew it was all the fault of that unhappy, cross-grained Pym. In short, the only person who retained full belief in Jack was his wife. Jack had surely done it, said Timberdale under the rose, but done it unintentionally.

Alice related her dream to Jack. Not being given to belief in dreams, Jack thought little of it. Nothing, in fact. It was no big, evil-faced man who harmed Pym, he answered, shaking his head; and he seemed to speak as one who knew.

Timberdale was no longer a pleasant resting-place for John Tanerton, and he quitted it for Liverpool, with Alice and their little girl. Aunt Dean received him coolly and distantly. The misfortune had put her out frightfully: with Jack’s income threatened, there would be less for herself to prey upon. She told him to his face that if he wanted to correct Pym, he might have waited till they got out to sea: blows were not thought much of on board ship.

The next day Jack paid a visit to the owners, and resigned his command. For, he was still attached ostensibly to the Rose of Delhi, though another master had temporarily superseded him.

“Why do you do this?” asked Mr. Charles Freeman. “We can put you into another ship, one going on a shorter voyage, and when your own comes home you can take her again.”

“No,” said Jack. “Many thanks, though, for your confidence in me. All the world seems to believe me guilty. If I were guilty I am not fit to command a ship’s crew.”

“But you were not guilty?”

More emphatically than Jack had yet spoken upon the affair, he spoke now: and his truthful, candid eyes went straight into those of his questioner.

“I was not. Before Heaven, I say it.”

Charles Freeman heaved a sigh of relief. He liked Jack, and the matter had somewhat troubled him.

“Then, Captain Tanerton—I fully believe you—why not reconsider your determination, and remain on active service? The Shamrock is going to Madras; sails in a day or two; and you shall have her. She’ll be home again before the Rose of Delhi. For your own sake I think you should do this—to still rancorous tongues.”

Jack sighed. “I can’t feel free to go,” he said. “This suspicion has troubled me more than you can imagine. I must get some employment on shore.”

“You should stand up before the world and assert your innocence in this same emphatic manner,” returned the owner. “Why have you not done it?”

Jack’s voice took a tone of evasion at once. “I have not cared to do it.”

Charles Freeman looked at him. A sudden thought flashed into his mind.

“Are you screening some one, Captain Tanerton?”

“How can you ask such a question?” rejoined Jack. But the deep and sudden flush that rose with the words, gave fresh food for speculation to Mr. Freeman. He dropped his voice.

“Surely it was not Sir Dace Fontaine who—who killed him? The uncle and nephew were not on good terms.”

Jack’s face and voice brightened again—he could answer this with his whole heart. “No, no,” he impressively said, “it was not Sir Dace Fontaine. You may at least rely upon that.”

When I at length got back to Crabb, the Fontaines were there. After the inquest, they had gone again to Brighton. Poor Verena looked like a ghost, I thought, when I saw her on the Sunday in their pew at church.

“It has been a dreadful thing,” I said to her, as we walked on together after service; “but I am sorry to see you look so ill.”

“A dreadful thing!—ay, it has, Johnny Ludlow,” was her answer, spoken in a wail. “I expect it will kill some of us.”

Sir Dace looked ill too. His furtive eyes had glanced hither and thither during the service, like a man who has a scare upon him; but they seemed ever to come back to Verena.

Not another word was said by either of us until we were near the barn. Then Verena spoke.

“Where is John Tanerton?”

“In Liverpool, I hear.”

“Poor fellow!”

Her tone was as piteous as her words, as her looks. All the bloom had gone from her pretty face; its lips were white, dry, and trembling. In Coralie there was no change; her smiles were pleasant as ever, her manners as easy. The calamity had evidently passed lightly over her; as I expect most things in life did pass.

Saying good-morning at the turning, Sir Dace and Verena branched off to Maythorn Bank. Coralie lingered yet, talking with Mr. Todhetley.

“My dear, how ill your father is looking!” exclaimed the Squire.

“He does look ill,” answered Coralie. “He has never been quite the same since that night in London. He said one day that he could not get the sight of Pym out of his mind—as he saw him lying on the floor in Ship Street.”

“It must have been a sad sight.”

“Papa is also, I think, anxious about Verena,” added Coralie. “She has taken the matter to heart in quite an unnecessary manner; just, I’m sure, as if she intended to die over it. That must vex papa: I see him glancing at her every minute in the day. Oh, I assure you I am the only cheerful one of the family now,” concluded Coralie, lightly, as she ran away to catch the others.

That was the last we saw of them that year. On the morrow we left for Dyke Manor.

In the course of the autumn John Tanerton ran up to Timberdale from Liverpool. It had come to his knowledge that the Ash Farm, belonging to Robert Ashton, was to let—Grace had chanced to mention it incidentally when writing to Alice—and poor Jack thought if he could only take it his fortune was made. He was an excellent, practical farmer, and knew he could make it answer. But it would take two or three thousand pounds to stock the Ash Farm, and Jack had not as many available shillings. He asked his brother to lend him the money.

“I always knew you were deficient in common sense,” was the Rector’s sarcastic rejoiner to the request. “Three thousand pounds! What next?”

“It would be quite safe, Herbert: you know how energetic I am. And I will pay you good interest.”

“No doubt you will—when I lend it you. You have a cheek!”

“But——”

“That will do; don’t waste breath,” interrupted Herbert, cutting him short. And he positively refused the request—refused to listen to another word.

Strolling past Maythorn Bank that same afternoon, very much down in looks and spirits, Jack saw Sir Dace Fontaine. He was leaning over his little gate, looking just as miserable as Jack. For Sir Dace to look out of sorts was nothing unusual; for Jack it was. Sir Dace asked what was amiss: and Jack—candid, free-spoken, open-natured Jack—told of his disappointment in regard to the Ash Farm: his brother not feeling inclined to advance him the necessary money to take it—three thousand pounds.

“I wonder you do not return to the sea, Captain Tanerton,” cried Sir Dace.

“I do not care to return to it,” was Jack’s answer.

“Why?”

“I shall never go to sea again, Sir Dace,” he said in his candour.

“Never go to sea again!”

“No. At any rate, not until I am cleared. While this dark cloud of suspicion lies upon me I am not fit to take the command of others. Some windy night insubordinate men might throw the charge in my teeth.”

“You are wrong,” said Sir Dace, his countenance taking an angry turn. “You know, I presume, your own innocence—and you should act as if you knew it.”

He turned back up the path without another word, entered his house, and shut the door. Jack walked slowly on. Presently he heard footsteps behind him, looked round, and saw Verena Fontaine. They had not met since the time of Pym’s death, and Jack thought he had never seen such a change in any one. Her bright colour was gone, her cheeks were wasted—a kind of dumb despair sat in her once laughing blue eyes. All Jack’s pity—and he had his share of it—went out to her.

“I heard a little of what you said to papa at the garden-gate, Captain Tanerton—not much of it. I was in the arbour. Why is it that you will not yet go to sea again? What is it you wait for?”

“I am waiting until I can stand clear in the eyes of men,” answered Jack, candid as usual, but somewhat agitated, as if the topic were a sore one. “No man with a suspicion attaching to him should presume to hold authority over other men.”

“I understand you,” murmured Verena. “If you stood as free from suspicion with all the world as you are in my heart, and—and”—she paused from emotion—“and I think in my father’s also, you would have no cause to hesitate.”

Jack took a questioning glance at her; at the sad, eager eyes that were lifted beseechingly to his. “It is kind of you to say so much,” he answered. “It struck me at the time of the occurrence that you could not, did not, believe me guilty.”

Verena shivered. As if his steady gaze were too much for her, she turned her own aside towards the blue sky.

“Good-bye,” she said faintly, putting out her hand. “I only wanted to say this—to let you know that I believe in your innocence.”

“Thank you,” said Jack, meeting her hand. “It is gratifying to hear that you do me justice.”

He walked quietly away. She stood still to watch him. And of all the distressed, sad, aching countenances ever seen in this world, few could have matched that of Miss Verena Fontaine.

V.

Spring sunshine, bright and warm to-day, lay on Timberdale. Herbert Tanerton, looking sick and ill, sat on a bench on the front lawn, holding an argument with his wife, shielded from outside gazers by the clump of laurel-trees. We used to say the Rector’s illnesses were all fancy and temper; but it seemed to be rather more than that now. Worse tempered he was than ever; Jack’s misfortunes and Jack’s conduct annoyed him. During the past winter Jack had taken some employment at the Liverpool Docks, in connection with the Messrs. Freeman’s ships. Goodness knew of what description it was, Herbert would say, turning up his nose.

A day or two ago Jack made his appearance again at the Rectory; had swooped down upon it without warning or ceremony, just as he had in the autumn. Herbert did not approve of that. He approved still less of the object which had brought Jack at all. Jack was tired of the Liverpool Docks; the work he had to do was not congenial to him; and he had now come to Timberdale to ask Robert Ashton to make him his bailiff. Not being able to take a farm on his own account, Jack thought the next best thing would be to take the management of one. Robert Ashton would be parting with his bailiff at Midsummer, and Jack would like to drop into the post. Anything much less congenial to the Rector’s notions, Jack could hardly have pitched upon.

“I can see what it is—Jack is going to be a thorn in my side for ever,” the Rector was remarking to his wife, who sat near him, doing some useful work. “He never had any idea of the fitness of things. A bailiff, now!—a servant!”

“I wish you would let him take a farm, Herbert—lend him the money to stock one.”

“I know you do; you have said so before.”

Grace sighed. But when she had it on her conscience to say a thing she said it.

“Herbert, you know—you know I have never thought it fair that we should enjoy all the income we do; and——”

“What do you mean by ‘fair’?” interrupted Herbert. “I only enjoy my own.”

“Legally it is yours. Rightly, a large portion of it ought to be Jack’s. It does not do us any good, Herbert, this superfluous income; you only put it by. It does not in the slightest degree add to our enjoyment of life.”

“Do be quiet, Grace—unless you can talk sense. Jack will get no money from me. He ought to be at sea. What right had he to give it up? The Rose of Delhi is expected back now: let him take her again.”

“You know why he will not, Herbert. And he must do something for a living. I wish you would not object to his engaging himself to Robert Ashton. If——”

“Why don’t you wish anything else that’s lowering and degrading? You are as devoid of common sense as he!” retorted the parson, walking away in a fume.

Matters were in this state when we got back to Crabb Cot; to stop at it for a longer or a shorter period as fate and the painters at Dyke Manor would allow. Jack urging Robert Ashton to promise him the bailiffs post—vacant the next Midsummer; Herbert strenuously objecting to it; and Robert Ashton in a state of dilemma between the two. He would have liked well enough to engage John Tanerton: but he did not like to defy the Rector. When the Squire heard this later, his opinion vacillated, according to custom: now leaning to Herbert’s side, now to Jack’s. And the Fontaines, we found, were in all the bustle of house-moving. Their own house, Oxlip Grange, being at length ready for them, they were quitting Maythorn Bank.

“Goodness bless me!” cried the Squire, coming in at dusk from a stroll he had taken the evening of our arrival. “I never got such a turn in my life.”

“What has given it you, sir?”

“What has given it me, Johnny? why, Sir Dace Fontaine. I never saw any man so changed,” he went on, rubbing up his hair. “He looks like a ghost, more than a man.”

“Is he ill?”

“He must be ill. Sauntering down that narrow lane by Maythorn Bank, I came upon a tall something mooning along like a walking shadow. I might have taken it for a shadow, but that it lifted its bent head, and threw its staring eyes straight into mine—and I protest that a shadowy sensation crept over myself when I recognized it for Fontaine. You never saw a face so gloomy and wan. How long is it since we saw him, Johnny?”

“About nine months, I think, sir.”

“The man must be suffering from a wasting complaint, or else he has some secret care that’s fretting him to fiddle-strings. Mark my words, all of you, it is one or the other.”

“Dear me!” put in Mrs. Todhetley, full of pity. “I always thought him a gloomy man. Did you ask him whether he was ill?”

“Not I,” said the pater: “he gave me no opportunity. Had I been a sheriffs-officer with a writ in my hand he could hardly have turned off shorter. They had moved into the other house that day, he muttered, and he must lock up Maythorn Bank and be after them.”

This account of Sir Dace was in a measure cleared up the next morning. Who should come in after breakfast but the surgeon, Cole. Talking of this and that, Sir Dace Fontaine’s name came up.

“I am on my way now to Sir Dace; to the new place,” cried Cole. “They went into it yesterday. Might have gone in a month ago, but Sir Dace made no move to do it. He seems to have no heart left to do anything; neither heart nor energy.”

“I knew he was ill,” cried the Squire. “No mistaking that. And now, Cole, what is it that’s the matter with him?”

“He shows symptoms of a very serious inward complaint,” gravely answered Cole. “A complaint that, if it really does set in, must prove fatal. We have some hopes yet that we shall ward it off. Sir Dace does not think we shall, and is in a rare fright about himself.”

“A fright, is he! That’s it, then.”

“Never saw any man in such a fright before,” went on Cole. “Says he’s going to die—and he does not want to die.”

“I said last night the man was like a walking shadow. And there’s a kind of scare in his face.”

Cole nodded. “Two or three weeks ago I got a note from him, asking me to call. I found him something like a shadow, as you observe, Squire. The cold weather had kept him indoors, and I had not chanced to see him for some weeks. When Sir Dace told me his symptoms, I suppose I looked grave. Combined with his wasted appearance, they unpleasantly impressed me, and he took alarm. ‘The truth,’ he said, in his arbitrary way: ‘tell me the truth; only that. Conceal nothing.’ Well, when a patient adjures me in a solemn manner to tell the truth, I deem it my duty to do so,” added Cole, looking up.

“Go on, Cole,” cried the Squire, nodding approval.

“I told him the truth, softening it in a degree—that I did not altogether like some of the symptoms, but that I hoped, with skill and care, to get him round again. The same day he sent for Darbyshire of Timberdale, saying we must attend him conjointly, for two heads were better than one. Two days later he sent for somebody else—no other than Mr. Ben Rymer.”

We all screamed out in surprise. “Ben Rymer!”

“Ay,” said Cole, “Ben Rymer. Ben has got through and is a surgeon now, like the rest of us. And, upon my word, I believe the fellow has his profession thoroughly in hand. He will make a name in the world, the chances for it being afforded him, unless I am mistaken.”

Something like moisture stood in the Squire’s good old eyes. “If his father, poor Rymer, had but lived to see it!” he softly said. “Anxiety, touching Ben, killed him.”

“So we three doctors make a pilgrimage to Sir Dace regularly everyday; sometimes together, sometimes apart,” added Cole. “And, of the three of us, I believe the patient likes young Rymer best—has most confidence in him.”

“Shall you cure him?”

“Well, we do not yet give up hope. If the disease does set in, it will——”

“What?”

“Run its course quickly.”

“An instant yet, Cole,” cried the Squire, stopping the surgeon as he was turning away. “You have told us nothing. How does the parish get on?—and the people? How is Letsom?—and Crabb generally? Tanerton—how is he?—and Timberdale? Coming here fresh, we are thirsting for news.”

Cole laughed. He knew the pater liked gossip as much as any old woman: and the reader must understand that, as yet, we had not heard any, having reached Crabb Cot late the previous afternoon.

“There is no particular news, Squire,” said he. “Letsom is well; so is Crabb. Herbert Tanerton’s not well. He is in a crusty way over Jack.”

“He is always in a way over something. Where is Jack?”

“Jack’s here, at the Rectory; just come to it. Robert Ashton’s bailiff is about to take a farm on his own account, and Jack came rushing over from Liverpool to apply for the post.”

Tod, who had been too much occupied with his fishing-flies to take much heed before, set up a shrill whistle at this. “How will the parson like that?” he asked.

“The parson does not like it at all. Whether he will succeed in preventing it, is another matter,” concluded Cole. And, with that, he made his escape.

Close upon the surgeon’s departure, Colonel Letsom came in; he had heard of our arrival. It was a pity, he said, the two brothers should be at variance. Jack wanted the post—he must make a living somehow; and the Rector was in a way over it; not quite mad, but next door to it; Ashton of course not knowing what to do between them. From that subject, he began to speak of the Fontaines.

A West Indian planter, one George Bazalgette, had been over on a visit, he said, and had spent Christmas at Maythorn Bank; his object being to induce Verena to accept him as her husband. Verena would not listen to him, and he wasted his eloquence in vain. She made no hesitation in vowing to him that her affections were buried in the grave of Edward Pym.

“Fontaine told me confidentially in London that he intended she should have Bazalgette,” remarked the Squire. “It was the evening we went looking for her at that wax-work place.”

“Ay; but Fontaine is changed,” returned the colonel: “all his old domineering ways are gone out of him. When Bazalgette was over here, he did not attempt even to persuade her: she must take her own course, he said. So poor Bazalgette went back as he came—wifeless. It was a pity.”

“Why?”

“Because this George Bazalgette was a nice fellow,” replied Colonel Letsom. “An open-hearted, fine-looking, generous man, and desperately in love with her. Miss Verena will not readily find his compeer in a summer day’s march.”

“As old as Adam, I suppose, colonel,” interjected Tod.

“Yes—if you choose to put Adam’s age down at three or four and thirty,” laughed the colonel, as he took his leave.

To wait many hours, once she was at Crabb, without laying in a stock of those delectable “family pills,” invented by the late Thomas Rymer, would have been quite beyond the philosophy of Mrs. Todhetley. That first morning, not ten minutes after Colonel Letsom left us, taking the Squire with him, she despatched me to Timberdale for a big box of them. Tod would not come: said he had his flies to see to.

Dashing through the Ravine and out on the field beyond it, I came upon Jack Tanerton. Good old Jack! The Squire had said Sir Dace was changed: I saw that Jack was. He looked taller and thinner, and the once beaming face had care upon it.

“Where are you bound for, Jack?”

“Not for any place in particular. Just sauntering about.”

“Walk my way, then. I am going to Rymer’s.”

“It is such nonsense,” cried Jack, speaking of his brother, after we had plunged a bit into affairs. “Calling it derogatory, and all the rest of it! I could be just as much of a gentleman as Ashton’s bailiff as I am now. Everybody knows me. He gives a good salary, and there’s a pretty house; and I have also my own small income. Alice and I and the little ones should be as happy as the day’s long. If I give in to Herbert and don’t take it, I don’t see what I am to turn to.”

“But, Jack, why do you give up the sea?” I asked. And Jack told me what he had told others: he should never take command again until he was a free man.

“Don’t you think you are letting that past matter hold too great an influence over you?” I presently said. “You must be conscious of your own innocence—and yet you seem as sad and subdued as though you were guilty!”

“I am subdued because other people think me guilty!” he answered. “Changed? I am. It is that which has changed me; not the calamity itself.”

“Jack, were I you, I should stand up in the face and eyes of all the world, and say to them, ‘Before God, I did not kill Pym.’ People would believe you then. But you don’t do it.”

“I have my reasons for not doing it, Johnny Ludlow. God knows what they are; He knows all things. I dare say I may be set right with the world in time: though I don’t see how it is to be done.”

A smart young man, a new assistant, was behind the counter at Ben Rymer’s, and served me with the pills. Coming out, box in hand, we met Ben himself. I hardly knew him, he was so spruce. His very hair and whiskers were trimmed down to neatness and looked of a more reasonable colour; his red-brown beard was certainly handsome, and his clothes were well cut.

“Why, he has grown into a dandy, Jack,” I said, after we had stood a minute or two, talking with the surgeon.

“Yes,” said Jack, “he is going in for the proprieties of life now. Ben may make a gentleman yet—and a good man to boot.”

That same afternoon, it chanced that the Squire met Ben Rymer. Striding along in his powerful fashion, Ben came full tilt round the sharp corner that makes the turning to the Islip Road, and nearly ran over the pater. Ben had been to Oxlip Grange.

“So, sir,” cried the pater, stopping him, “I hear you are in practice now, and intend to become a respectable man. It’s time you did.”

“Ay, at last,” replied Ben good-humouredly. “It is a long lane, Squire, that has no turning.”

“Don’t you lapse back again, Mr. Ben.”

“Not if I know it, sir. I hope I shall not.”

“It was anxiety on your score, you know, that troubled your good father’s mind in dying.”

“If it did not bring his death on,” readily conceded Ben, his light tone changing. “I know it all, Squire—and have felt it.”

“Look here,” cried the Squire, catching at Ben’s button-hole, which had a lovely lily-of-the-valley in it, “there was nothing on earth your poor patient father prayed for so earnestly as for your welfare; that you might be saved for time and eternity. Now I don’t believe such prayers are ever lost. So you will be helped on your way if you bear steadfastly onwards.”

Giving the young man’s hand a wring, the Squire turned off on his way. In half-a-minute he was back again.

“Hey, Mr. Benjamin?—here. How is Sir Dace Fontaine? I suppose you have just left him?”

So Ben had to come back at the call. To the pater’s surprise he saw his eyes were moist.

“He is worse, sir, to-day; palpably worse.”

“Will he get over it?”

Ben gave his head an emphatic shake, which somehow belied his words: “Cole and Darbyshire think there is hope yet, Squire.”

“And you do not; that’s evident. Well, good-day.”

The next move in this veritable drama was the appearance of Alice Tanerton and her six-months-old baby at Timberdale. Looking upon the Rectory as almost her home—it had been Jack’s for many years of his life—Alice came to it without the ceremony of invitation: the object of her coming now being to strive to induce Herbert to let her husband engage himself to Robert Ashton. And this visit of Alice’s was destined to bring about a most extraordinary event.

One Wednesday evening when Jack and his wife were dining with us—and that troublesome baby, which Alice could not, as it seemed, stir abroad without, was in the nursery squealing—Alice chanced to say that she had to go to Islip the following day, her mother having charged her to see John Paul the lawyer, concerning a little property that she, Aunt Dean, held in Crabb. It would be a tremendously long walk for Alice from Timberdale, especially as she was not looking strong, and Mrs. Todhetley proposed that I should drive her over in the pony-carriage: which Alice jumped at.

Accordingly, the next morning, which was warm and bright, I took the pony-carriage to the Rectory, picked up Alice, and then drove back towards Islip. As we passed Oxlip Grange, which lay in our way, Sir Dace Fontaine was outside in the road, slowly pacing the side-path. I thought I had never seen a man look so ill: so down and gloomy. He raised his eyes, as we came up, to give me a nod. I was nodding back again, when Alice screamed out and startled me. She started the pony too, which sprang on at a tangent.

“Johnny! Johnny Ludlow!” she gasped, her face whiter than death and her lips trembling like an aspen leaf, “did you see that man? Did you see him?”

“Yes. I was nodding to him. What is the matter?”

“It was the man I saw in my dream: the man who had committed the murder in it.”

I stared at her, wondering whether she had lost her wits.

“Do you remember the description I gave of that man?” she continued, in excitement. “I do. I wrote it down at the time, and Mr. Todhetley holds it, sealed up. Every word, every particular is in my memory now, as I saw him in my dream. ‘A tall, evil-looking, dark man in a long brown coat, who walked with his eyes fixed on the ground.’ I tell you, Johnny Ludlow, that is the man.”

Her vehemence infected me. I looked round after Sir Dace. He was turning this way now. Certainly the description seemed like enough. His countenance just now did look an evil one; and he was tall and he was dark, and he wore a long brown coat this morning, nearly reaching to his heels, and his eyes were fixed on the ground as he walked.

“But what if his looks do tally with the man you saw in your dream, Alice? What of it?”

“What of it!” she echoed, vehemently. “What of it! Why, don’t you see, Johnny Ludlow? This man must have killed Edward Pym.”

“Hush, Alice! It is impossible. This is Sir Dace Fontaine.”

“I do not care who he is,” was her impulsive retort. “As surely as that Heaven is above us, Edward Pym got his death at the hand of this man. My dream revealed it to me.”

I might as well have tried to stem a torrent as to argue with her; so I drove on and held my tongue. Arrived at the office of Paul and Chandler, I following her in, leaving a boy with the pony outside. Alice pounced upon old Paul with the assertion: Sir Dace Fontaine was the evil and guilty man she had seen in her dream. Considering that Paul was a sort of cousin to Sir Dace’s late wife, this was pretty well. Old Paul stared at her as I had done. Her cheeks were hectic, her eyes wildly earnest. She recalled to the lawyer’s memory the dream she had related to him; she asserted in the most unqualified manner that Dace Fontaine was guilty. Tom Chandler, who was old Paul’s partner and had married his daughter Emma, came into the room in the middle of it, and took his share of staring.

“It must be investigated,” said Alice to them. “Will you undertake it?”

“My dear young lady, one cannot act upon a fancy—a dream,” cried old Paul: and there was a curious sound of compassionate pity in his voice, which betrayed to Alice the gratifying fact that he was regarding her as a monomaniac.

“If you will not act, others will,” she concluded at last, after exhausting her arguments in vain. And she came away with me in resentment, having totally forgotten all about her mother’s business.

To Crabb Cot then—she would go—to take counsel with the Squire. He told her to her face she was worse than a lunatic to suspect Sir Dace; and he would hardly get out the sealed packet at all. It was opened at last, and the dream, as written down in it by herself at the time, read.

“John Tanerton, my husband, was going to sea in command,” it began. “He came to me the morning of the day they were to sail, looking very patient, pale and sorrowful: more so than any one, I think, could look in life. He and I seemed to have had some estrangement the previous night that was not remembered by either of us now, and I, for one, repented of it. Somebody was murdered (though I could not tell how this had been revealed to me), some man; Jack was suspected by all people, but they could not bring it home to him. We were in some strange town; strangers in it; though I, as it seemed to me, had been in it once, many years before. All this while, Jack was standing before me in his sadness and sorrow, mutely appealing to me, as it seemed, to clear him. Everybody was talking of it and glancing at us askance, everybody shunned us, and we were in cruel distress. Suddenly I remembered that when I was in the town before, the man now murdered had had a bitter quarrel with another man, a gentleman of note in the town; and a conviction came over me, powerful as a revelation, that it was he who had now committed the murder. I left Jack, and told this to some one connected with the ship, its owner, I think. He laughed at the words, saying that the gentleman I would accuse was of high authority in the town, one of its first magnates. That he had done it, however high he might be, I felt perfectly certain; but nobody would listen to me; nobody would heed so improbable a tale: and, in the trouble this brought me, I awoke. Such trouble! Nothing like it could be felt in real life.

“That was dream the first.

“I lay awake for some little time thinking of it, and then went to sleep again: and this was dream the second.

“The dream seemed to recommence from where it had left off. It was afternoon. I was in a large open carriage, going through the streets of the town, the ship’s owner (as I say I think he was) sitting beside me. In passing over a bridge we saw two gentlemen walking towards us arm-in-arm on the footpath, one of them an officer in a dusky old red uniform and cocked hat, the other a tall, evil-looking dark man, who wore a long brown coat and kept his eyes on the ground. Though I had never seen him in my life before, I knew it was the guilty man; he had killed the other, committed the crime in secret: but ere I could speak, he who was sitting with me said, ‘There’s the gentleman you would have accused this morning. He stands before everybody else in the town. Fancy your accusing him of such a thing!’ It seemed to me that I did not answer, could not answer for the pain. That he was guilty I knew, and not Jack, but I had no means of bringing it home to him. He and the man in uniform walked on in their secure immunity, and I went on in the carriage in my pain. The pain awoke me.

“And now it only remains for me to declare that I have set down this singular dream truthfully, word for word; and I shall seal it up and keep it. It may be of use if any trouble falls upon Jack, as the dream seems to foretell—and of some trouble in store for him he has already felt the shadow. So strangely vivid a dream, and the intense pain it brought and leaves with me, can hardly have visited me for nothing.—Alice Tanerton.”

That was all the paper said. The Squire, poring through his good old spectacles over it, shook his head as Alice pointed out the description of the guilty man, how exactly it tallied with the appearance of Sir Dace Fontaine; but he only repeated Paul the lawyer’s words, “One cannot act upon a dream.”

“It was Sir Dace; it was Sir Dace,” reiterated Alice, clasping her hands piteously. “I am as sure of it as that I hope to go to heaven.” And I drove her home in the belief.

There ensued a commotion. Not a commotion to be told to the parish, but a private one amidst ourselves. I never saw a woman in such a fever of excitement as Alice Tanerton was in from that day, or any one take up a matter so warmly.

Captain Tanerton did not adopt her views. He shook his head, and said Sir Dace it could not have been. Sir Dace was at his house in the Marylebone Road at the very hour the calamity happened off Tower Hill. I followed suit, hearing out Jack’s word. Was I not at the Marylebone Road that evening myself, playing chess with Coralie?—and was not Sir Dace shut up in his library all the time, and never came out of it?

Alice listened, and looked puzzled to death. But she held to her own opinion. And when a fit of desperate obstinacy takes possession of a woman without rhyme or reason, you cannot shake it. As good try to argue with the whistling wind. She did not pretend to see how it could have been, she said, but Sir Dace was guilty. And she haunted Paul and Chandler’s office at Islip, praying them to take the matter up.

At length, to soothe her, and perhaps to prevent her carrying it elsewhere, they promised they would. And of course they had to make some show of doing it.

One evening Tom Chandler came to Crabb Cot and asked to see me alone. “I want you to tell me all the particulars you remember of that fatal night,” he began, when I went to him in the Squire’s little room. “I have taken down Captain Tanerton’s testimony, and I must have yours, Johnny.”

“But, are you going to stir in it?”

“We must do something, I suppose. Paul thinks so. I am going to London to-morrow on other matters, and shall use the opportunity to make an inquiry or two. It is rather a strange piece of business altogether,” added Mr. Chandler, as he took his place at the table and drew the inkstand towards him. “John Tanerton is innocent. I feel sure of that.”

“How strongly Mrs. Tanerton has taken it up!”

“Pretty well for that,” answered Tom Chandler, a smile on his good-natured face. “She told us yesterday in the office that it must be the consciousness of guilt which has worried Sir Dace to a skeleton. Now then, we’ll begin.”

He dotted down my answers to his questions, also what I voluntarily added. Then he took a sheet of paper from his pocket, closely written upon, and compared its statements—they were Tanerton’s—with mine. Putting his finger on the paper to mark a place, he looked at me.

“Did Sir Dace speak of Pym or of Captain Tanerton that night, when you were playing chess with Miss Fontaine?”

“Sir Dace did not come into the drawing-room. He had left the dinner-table in a huff to shut himself up in his library, Miss Fontaine said; and he stayed in it.”

“Then you did not see Sir Dace at all that night?”

“Oh yes, later—when Captain Tanerton and young Saxby came up to tell him of the death. We then all went down to Ship Street together. You have taken that down.”

“True,” said Chandler. “Well, I cannot make much out of it as it stands,” he concluded, folding the papers and putting them in his pocket-book. “What do you say is the number of the house in the Marylebone Road?”

I told him, and he went away, wishing he could accept my offer of staying to drink tea with us.

“Look here, Chandler,” I said to him at the front-door: “why don’t you take down Sir Dace Fontaine’s evidence, as well as mine and Tanerton’s?”

“I have done it,” he answered. “I was with Sir Dace to-day. Mrs. Tanerton’s suspicions are of course—absurd,” he added, making a pause, as if at a loss for a suitable word, “but for her peace of mind, poor lady, we would like to pitch upon the right individual if we can. And as yet he seems to be a myth.”

The good ship, Rose of Delhi, came gaily into port, and took up her berth in St. Katharine’s Docks as before; for she had been chartered for London. Her owners, the Freemans, wrote at once from Liverpool to Captain Tanerton, begging him to resume command. Jack wrote back, and declined.

How is it that whispers get about! Do the birds in the air carry them?—or the winds of heaven? In some cases it seems impossible that anything else can have done it. Paul and Chandler, John Tanerton and his wife, the Squire and myself: we were the only people cognizant of the new suspicion that Alice was striving to cast on Sir Dace, one and all of us had kept silent lips: and yet, the rumour got abroad. Sir Dace Fontaine was accused of knowing more about Pym’s death than he ought to know, and Tom Chandler was in London for the purpose of investigating it. This might not have mattered very much for ordinary ears, but it reached those of Sir Dace.

Coralie Fontaine heard it from Mary Ann Letsom. In Mary Ann’s indignation at the report, she spoke it out to Coralie; and Coralie, laughing at the absurdity of the thing, repeated it to Sir Dace. How he received it, or what he said about it, did not transpire.

A stagnant kind of atmosphere seemed to hang over us just then, like the heavy, unnatural calm that precedes the storm. Sir Dace got weaker day by day, more of a shadow; Herbert Tanerton and his brother were still at variance, so far as Jack’s future was concerned; and Mr. Chandler seemed to have taken up his abode in London for good.

“Does he never mean to come back?” demanded Alice one day of the Squire: and her lips and cheeks were red with fever as she asked it. The truth was, that some cause of Paul and Chandler’s then on at Westminster was prolonging itself out—even when it did begin—unconscionably.

One morning I met Ben Rymer as he was leaving Oxlip Grange. Coralie Fontaine had walked with him to the gate, talking earnestly, their two heads together. Ben shook hands with her and came out, looking as grave as a judge.

“How is Sir Dace?” I asked him. “Getting on?”

“Getting off,” responded Ben. “For that’s what it will be now; and not long first, unless he mends.”

“Is he worse?”

“He is nearly as bad as he can be, to be alive. And yesterday, he must needs go careering off to Islip by himself to transact some business with Paul the lawyer! He was no more fit for it than—than this is,” concluded Ben, giving a flick to his silk umbrella as he marched off. Ben went in for silk umbrellas now: in the old days a cotton one would have been too good for him.

“I am so sorry to hear Sir Dace is no better,” I said to Coralie Fontaine, who had waited at the gate to speak to me.

Coralie shook her head. Some deep feeling sat in her generally passive face: the tears stood in her eyes.

“Thank you, Johnny Ludlow. It is very sad. I feel sure Mr. Rymer has given up all hope, though he does not say so to me. Verena looks nearly as ill as papa. I wish we had never come to Europe!”

“Sir Dace exerts himself too greatly, Mr. Rymer says.”

“Yes; and worries himself also. As if his affairs needed as much as a thought!—I am sure they must be just as straight and smooth as yonder green plain. He had to see Mr. Paul yesterday about some alteration in his will, and went to Islip, instead of sending for Paul here. I thought he would have died when he got home. Papa has a strange restlessness upon him. Good-bye, Johnny. I’d ask you to come in but that things are all so miserable.”

It was late in the evening, getting towards bedtime. Mrs. Todhetley had gone upstairs with the face-ache, Tod was over at old Coney’s, and I and the Squire were sitting alone, when Thomas surprised us by showing in Tom Chandler. We did not know he was back from London.

“Yes, I got back this evening,” said he, as he sat down near the lamp, and spread some papers out on the table. “I am in a bit of a dilemma, Mr. Todhetley; and I am come here at this late hour to put it before you.”

Chandler’s voice had dropped to a mysterious whisper; his eyes were glancing at the door to make sure it was shut. The Squire pushed up his spectacles and drew his chair nearer. I sat on the opposite side, wondering what was coming.

“That suspicion of Alice Tanerton’s—that Sir Dace killed Pym,” went on Chandler, his left hand resting on the papers, his eyes on the Squire’s. “I think it was a true one.”

“A what?” cried the pater.

“A true one. That Sir Dace did kill him.”

“Goodness bless me!” gasped the Squire, his good old face taking a lighter tint. “What on earth do you mean, man?”

“Well, I mean just that,” answered Chandler. “And I feel myself to be, in consequence, in an uncommonly awkward position. One can’t well accuse Sir Dace, a man close upon the grave; and Paul’s relative in addition. And yet, Captain Tanerton must be cleared.”

“I can’t make top or tail of what you mean, Tom Chandler!” cried the Squire, blinking like a bewildered owl. “Don’t you think you are dreaming?”

“Wish I was,” said Tom, “so far as this business goes. Look here. I’ll begin at the beginning and go through the story. You’ll understand it then.”

“It’s more than I do now. Or Johnny, either. Look at him!”

“When Mrs. John Tanerton brought to us that accusation of Sir Dace, on the strength of her dream,” began Chandler, after glancing at me, “I thought she must have turned a little crazy. It was a singular dream; there’s no denying that; and the exact resemblance to Sir Dace Fontaine of the man she saw in it, was still more singular: so much so, that I could not help being impressed by it. Another thing that strongly impressed me, was Captain Tanerton’s testimony: from the moment I heard it and weighed his manner in giving it, I felt sure of his innocence. Revolving these matters in my own mind, I resolved to go to Sir Dace and get him to give me his version of the affair; not in the least endorsing in my own mind her suspicion of him, or hinting at it to him, you understand; simply to get more evidence. I went to Sir Dace, heard what he had to say, and brought away with me a most unpleasant doubt.”

“That he was guilty?”

“That he might be. His manner was so confused, himself so agitated when I first spoke. His hands trembled, his lips grew white, He strove to turn it off, saying I had startled him, but I felt a very queer doubt arising in my mind. His narrative had to be drawn from him; it was anything but clear, and full of contradictions. ‘Why do you come to me about this?’ he asked: ‘have you heard anything?’ ‘I only come to ask you for information,’ was my answer: ‘Mrs. John Tanerton wants the matter looked into. If her husband is not guilty, he ought to be cleared in the face of the world.’ ‘Nobody thinks he was guilty,’ retorted Sir Dace in a shrill tone of annoyance. ‘Nobody was guilty: Pym must have fallen and injured himself.’ I came away from the interview, as I tell you, with my doubts very unpleasantly stirred,” resumed Chandler; “and it caused me to be more earnest in looking after odds and ends of evidence in London than I otherwise might have been.”

“Did you pick up any?”

“Ay, I did. I turned the people at the Marylebone lodgings inside out, so to say; I found out a Mrs. Ball, where Verena Fontaine had hidden herself; and I quite haunted Dame Richenough’s in Ship Street, Tower Hill. There I met with Mark Ferrar. A piece of good fortune, for he told me something that——”

“What was it?” gasped the Squire, eagerly.

“Why this—and a most important piece of evidence it is. That night, not many minutes before the fatal accident must have occurred, Ferrar saw Sir Dace Fontaine in Ship Street, watching Pym’s room. He was standing in an entry on the opposite side of the street, gazing across at Pym’s. This, you perceive, disproves one fact testified to—that Sir Dace spent that evening shut up in his library at home. Instead of that he was absolutely down on the spot.”

The Squire rubbed his face like a helpless man. “Why could not Ferrar have said so at the time?” he asked.

“Ferrar attached no importance to it; he thought Sir Dace was but looking over to see whether his daughter was at Pym’s. But Ferrar had no opportunity of giving testimony: he sailed away the next morning in the ship. Nothing could exceed his astonishment when I told him in London that Captain Tanerton lay under the suspicion. He has taken Crabb on his way to Worcester to support this testimony if needful, and to impart it privately to Tanerton.”

“Well, it all seems a hopeless puzzle to me,” returned the pater. “Why on earth did not Jack speak out more freely, and say he was not guilty?”

“I don’t know. The fact, that Sir Dace did go out that night,” continued Chandler, “was confirmed by one of the maids in the Marylebone Road—Maria; a smart girl with curled hair. She says Sir Dace had not been many minutes in the library that night, to which he went straight from the dinner-table in a passion, when she saw him leave it again, catch up his hat with a jerk as he passed through the hall, and go out at the front-door. It was just after Ozias had been to ask him whether he would take some coffee, and got sent away with a flea in his ear. Whether or not Sir Dace came in during the evening, Maria does not know; he may, or may not, have done so, but she did see him come home in a cab at ten o’clock, or soon after it. She was gossipping with the maids at a house some few doors off, when a cab stopped near to them, Sir Dace got out of it, paid the man, and walked on to his own door. Maria supposed the driver had made a mistake in the number. So you see there can be no doubt that Sir Dace was out that night.”

“He was certainly in soon after ten,” I remarked. “Verena came home about that time, and she saw him downstairs.”

“Don’t you bring her name up, Johnny,” corrected the Squire. “That young woman led to all the mischief. Running away, as she did—and sending us off to that wax-work show in search of her! Fine figures they cut, some of those dumb things!”

“I found also,” resumed Chandler, turning over his papers, on which he had looked from time to time, “that Sir Dace met with one or two slight personal mishaps that night. He sprained his wrist, accounting for it the next morning by saying he had slipped in getting into bed; and he lost a little piece out of his shirt-front.”

“Out of his shirt front!”

“Just here,” and Chandler touched the middle button of his shirt. “The button-hole and a portion of the linen round it had been torn away. Nothing would have been known of that but for the laundress. She brought the shirt back before putting it into water, lest it should be said she had done it in the washing. Maria remembered this, and told me. A remarkably intelligent girl, that.”

“Did Maria—I remember the girl—suspect anything?” asked the Squire.

“Nothing whatever. She does not now; I accounted otherwise for my inquiries. Altogether, what with these facts I have told you, and a few minor items, and Ferrar’s evidence, I can draw but one conclusion—that Sir Dace Fontaine killed Pym.”

“I never heard such a strange thing!” cried the pater. “And what’s to be done?”

“That’s the question,” said Chandler. “What is to be done?” And he left us with the doubt.

Well, it turned out to be quite true; but I have not space here to go more into detail. Sir Dace Fontaine was guilty, and the dream was a true dream.

“Did you suspect him?” the Squire asked privately of Jack, who was taken into counsel the next day.

“No, I never suspected Sir Dace,” Jack answered. “I suspected some one else—Verena.”

“No!”

“I did. About half-past eight o’clock that night, Ferrar had seen a young lady—or somebody dressed as one—watching Pym’s house from the opposite entry: just where, it now appears, he later saw Sir Dace. Ferrar thought it was Verena Fontaine. A little later, in fact just after the calamity must have occurred, Alfred Saxby also saw a young lady running from the direction of the house, whom he also took to be Verena. Ferrar and I came to the same conclusion—I don’t know about Saxby—that Verena must have been present when it happened. I thought that, angry at the state Pym was in, she might have given him a push in her vexation, perhaps inadvertently, and that he fell. Who knew?”

“But Verena was elsewhere that evening, you know; at a concert.”

“I knew she said so; but I did not believe it. Of course I know now that both Ferrar and Saxby were mistaken; that it was somebody else they saw, who bore, one must imagine, some general resemblance to her.”

“Well, I think you might have known better,” cried the Squire.

“Yes, I suppose I ought to. But, before the inquest had terminated, I chanced to be alone with Verena; and her manner—nay, her words, two or three she said—seemed to imply her guilt, and also a consciousness that I must be aware of it. I had no doubt at all from that hour.”

“And is it for that reason, consideration for her, that you have partially allowed suspicion to rest upon yourself?” pursued the Squire, hotly.

“Of course. How could I be the means of throwing it upon a defenceless girl?”

“Well, John Tanerton, you are a chivalrous goose!”

“Verena must have known the truth all along.”

“That’s not probable,” contended the Squire. “And Chandler wants to know what is to be done.”

“Nothing all all, that I can see,” answered Jack. “Sir Dace is not in a condition to have trouble thrown upon him.”

Good Jack! generous Jack! There are not many such self-denying spirits in the world.

And what would have been done is beyond guessing, had Sir Dace not solved the difficulty himself. Solved it by dying.

But I must first tell of a little matter that happened. Although we had heard what we had, one could not treat the man cavalierly, and the Squire—just as good at heart as Jack—went up to make inquiries at Oxlip Grange, as usual. One day he and Colonel Letsom strolled up together, and were asked to walk in. Sir Dace wished to see them.

“If ever you saw a living skeleton, it’s what he is,” cried the Squire to us when he came home. “It is in the nature of the disease, I believe, that he should be. Dress him up in his shroud, and you’d take him for nothing but bones.”

Sir Dace was in the easy-chair by his bedroom fire, Coralie sitting with him. By his side stood a round table with papers and letters upon it.

“I am glad you have chanced to call,” he said to them, as he sent Coralie away. “I wanted my signature witnessed by some one in influential authority. You are both county magistrates.”

“The signature to your will,” cried the Squire, falling to that conclusion.

“Not my will,” answered Sir Dace. “That is settled.”

He turned to the table, his long, emaciated, trembling fingers singling out a document that lay upon it. “This is a declaration,” he said, “which I have written out myself, being of sound mind, you perceive, and which I wish to sign in your presence. I testify that every word written in it is truth; I, a dying man, swear that it is so, before God.”

His shaky hands scrawled his signature, Dace Fontaine; and the Squire and Colonel Letsom added theirs to it. Sir Dace then sealed up the paper, and made them each affix his seal also. He then tottered to a cabinet standing by the bed’s head, and locked it up in it.

“You will know where to find it when I am gone,” he said. “I wish some one of you to read it aloud, after the funeral, to those assembled here. When my will shall have been read, then read this.”

On the third day after this, at evening, Sir Dace Fontaine died. We heard no more about anything until the day of the funeral, which took place on the following Monday. Sir Dace left a list of those he wished invited to it, and they went. Sir Robert Tenby, Mr. Brandon, Colonel Letsom and his eldest son; the parsons of Timberdale, Crabb, and Islip; the three doctors who had attended him; old Paul and Tom Chandler; Captain Tanerton, and ourselves.

He was buried at Islip, by his own directions. And when we got back to the Grange, after leaving him in the cold churchyard, Mr. Paul read out the will. Coralie and Verena sat in the room in their deep mourning. Coralie’s eyes were dry, but Verena sobbed incessantly.

Apart from a few legacies, one of which was to his servant Ozias, his property was left to his two daughters, in equal shares. The chief legacy, a large one, was left to John Tanerton—three thousand pounds. You should have seen Jack’s face of astonishment as he heard it. Herbert looked as if he could not believe his ears. And Verena glanced across at Jack with a happy flush.

“Papa charged me, just before he died, to say that a sealed paper of his would be found in his private cabinet, which was to be read out now,” spoke Coralie, in the pause which ensued, as old Paul’s voice ceased. “He said Colonel Letsom and Mr. Todhetley would know where to find it,” she added; breaking down with a sob.

The paper was fetched, and old Paul was requested to read it. So he broke the seals.

You may have guessed what it was: a declaration of his guilt—if guilt it could be called. In a straightforward manner he stated the particulars of that past night: and the following is a summary of them.

Sir Dace went out again that night after dinner, not in secret, or with any idea of secrecy; it simply chanced, he supposed, that no one saw him go. He was too uneasy about Verena to rest; he fully believed her to be with Pym; and he went down to Ship Street. Before entering the street he dismissed the cab, and proceeded cautiously to reconnoitre, believing that if he were seen, Pym would be capable of concealing Verena. After looking about till he was tired, he took up his station opposite Pym’s lodgings—which seemed to be empty—and stayed, watching, until close upon nine o’clock, when he saw Pym enter them. Before he had time to go across, the landlady began to close the shutters; while she was doing it, Captain Tanerton came up, and went in. Captain Tanerton came out in a minute or two, and walked quickly back up the street: he, Sir Dace, would have gone after him to ask him whether Verena was indoors with Pym, or not, but the captain’s steps were too fleet for him. Sir Dace then crossed over, opened the street-door, and entered Pym’s parlour. A short, sharp quarrel ensued. Pym was in liquor, and—consequently—insolent. In the heat of passion Sir Dace—he was a strong man then—seized Pym’s arm, and shook him. Pym flew at him in return like a tiger, twisted his wrist round, and tore his shirt. Sir Dace was furious then; he struck him a powerful blow on the head—behind the ear no doubt, as the surgeons testified afterwards—and Pym fell. Leaving him there, Sir Dace quitted the house quietly, never glancing at the thought that the blow could be fatal. But, when seated in a cab on the way home, the idea suddenly occurred to him—what if he had killed Pym? The conviction, though he knew not why, or wherefore, that he had killed him, took hold of him, and he went into his house, a terrified man. The rest was known, the manuscript went on to say. He allowed people to remain in the belief that he had not been out-of-doors that night: though how bitterly he repented not having declared the truth at the time, none could know, save God. He now, a dying man, about to appear before that God, who had been full of mercy to him, declared that this was the whole truth, and he further declared that he had no intention whatever of injuring Pym; all he thought was, to knock him down for his insolence. He hoped the world would forgive him, though he had never forgiven himself; and he prayed his daughters to forgive him, especially Verena. He would counsel her to return to the West Indies, and marry George Bazalgette.

That ended the declaration: and an astounding surprise it must have been to most of the eager listeners. But not one ventured to make any comment on it, good or bad. The legacy to John Tanerton was understood now. Verena crossed the room as we were filing out, and put her two hands into his.

“I have had a dreadful fear upon me that it was papa,” she whispered to him, the tears running down her cheeks. “Nay, worse than a fear: a conviction. I think you have had the same, Captain Tanerton, and that you have generously done your best to screen him; and I thank you with my whole heart.”

“But, indeed,” began Jack—and pulled himself up, short.

“Let me tell you all,” said Verena. “I saw papa come in that night: I mean to our lodgings in the Marylebone Road, so I knew he had been out. It was just past ten o’clock: Ozias saw him too—but he is silent and faithful. I did not want papa to see me; fate, I suppose, made me back into that little room, papa’s library, until he should have gone upstairs. He did not go up; he came into the room: and I hid myself behind the window curtain. I cannot describe to you how strange papa looked; dreadful; and he groaned and flung up his arms as one does in despair. It frightened me so much that I said nothing to anybody. Still I had not the key to it: I thought it must be about me: and the torn shirt—for I saw that, and saw him button his coat over it—I supposed he had, himself, done accidentally. I drew one of the glass doors softly open, got out that way, and up to the drawing-room. Then you came in with the news of Edward’s death. At first, for a day or so, I thought as others did—that suspicion lay on you. But, gradually, all these facts impressed themselves on my mind in their startling reality; and I felt, I saw, it could have been no other than he—my poor father. Oh, Captain Tanerton, forgive him! Forgive me!”

“There’s nothing to forgive; I am sorry it has come out now,” whispered Jack, deeming it wise to leave it at that, and he stooped and gave her the kiss of peace.

So this was the end of it. Of the affair which had so unpleasantly puzzled the world, and tried Jack.

Jack, loyal, honest-hearted Jack, shook hands with everybody, giving a double shake to Herbert’s, and went forthwith down to Liverpool.

“I will take the Rose of Delhi again, now,” he said to the Freemans. “For this next voyage, at any rate.”

“And for many a one after it, we hope, Captain Tanerton,” was their warm answer. And Jack and his bright face went direct from the office to New Brighton, to tell Aunt Dean.

And what became of the Miss Fontaines, you would like to ask? Well, I have not time at present to tell you about Coralie; I don’t know when I shall have. But, if you’ll believe me, Verena took her father’s advice, sailed back over the seas, and married George Bazalgette.